Students @ IMS

Students are the future of the MTT-S and the IMS. Each year the Steering Committee takes seriously the need to provide a program that encourages the professional growth of its future leaders.

Student Design Competitions: All eligible students or student teams are invited to participate in the International Microwave Symposium Student Design Competitions (SDCs). The competition encourages students to employ creative problem solving and gain practical design experience by developing a circuit, or system to address a problem stated in the competition rules while following specified constraints.

Student Paper Competition: The Student Paper Competition (SPC) is held to identify and recognize outstanding technical contributions from individual students. In general, it is preferred that the submitted paper have only few authors. The first author must be the student; the last author must be the student’s main advisor. Additional student co-authors are acceptable, but will also be subject to verification by the main advisor as detailed below. First, second, and third prizes will be awarded based on content and presentation where the criteria are ranked in the following order: 1.) Creativity or novelty of the ideas presented in the paper 2.) Paper quality and technical soundness of the presented work 3.) Oral presentation of the paper at the conference and response to audience questions.

Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) Competition: The 3MT® is designed to stimulate interest in the wide range of applications of microwave technology. Such information would help renew public interest in microwaves as a transformative technology that is rewarding both to those who study it, and to those whose daily lives benefit from incorporation of scientific developments in consumer products.

PhD Student Sponsorship Initiative: This initiative, established and sponsored by the IEEE MTT-S Administrative Committee, is available for all 1st/2nd year PhD students worldwide. The initiative provides sponsorship to attend IMS2022 and RFIC 2022 in Denver, CO, USA.

Project Connect: Provides under-represented minority engineering students the opportunity to attend IMS to interact with practicing engineers, to learn about the exciting new technologies being developed today, and to introduce students to the variety of careers in the area of microwave engineering.

Student Career Fair: Participating IMS exhibitors will be on hand to offer students guidance on careers including internships in our industry, for RF, microwave, and millimeter-wave devices, components, and systems design and development. In addition, the presenting companies will discuss future career opportunities within their companies and offer advice for students to successfully navigate from University to industry. There is no charge for students to attend the Career Counseling Fair; however participants must be registered IMS attendees.

Project Connect, will bring an exceptional group of undergraduate and first-year graduate students to the IEEE conference on a travel grant provided by NSF and IEEE. Students from underrepresented groups will be carefully selected based on their academic credentials and career goals, through a competitive application process.

The long-term goal of this program is to attract a diverse pool of highly motivated students to the field of microwave engineering. The technical planning committee for IMS recognizes that the future of this field depends on attracting the best and brightest from the next generation of increasingly diverse students possessing great aptitude for highly technical and innovative development.

The program is designed to create an opportunity for students to interact with practicing engineers, to learn about the exciting new technologies being developed today, and to introduce students to the variety of careers in the area of microwave engineering.

Project Connect Conference Agenda:
The program will host students at the IMS conference for three days. Specific agenda plans include: (1) Panel sessions where speakers from industry, government and academia will share their experiences in microwave engineering with an emphasis on leveraging collaboration and current state of the art to pursue novel and innovative solutions to challenging problems; (2) A session for IMS Project Connect participants to learn about applying to graduate school and writing effective resumes; (3) Exploring the conference using the Connect Monopoly™ workbook to obtain exciting networking, educational, and industrial experiences of IMS2020; (4) IMS Connect participants will share their experience with a “Through My Eyes” multimedia presentation at the program wrap-up meeting.

Participant Selection Criteria:
Undergraduate students and first-year graduate students in engineering or a closely related discipline (e.g. math, physics, etc.). Candidates should be members of under-represented groups in engineering. For example, in the United States these groups include women, American Indian/Native, Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian, African American/Black and Hispanic American/Latino.

• Participants should be over the age of 18 by the start of IMS2020, 21 June 2020
• Candidates will be selected based on their academic credentials, a recommendation letter, and their career ambitions as expressed in an application video. The selection committee is comprised of both academic and industry professionals.