 CERF is Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. It's a 10-week long paid program where we have graduate mentors and faculty mentors guide us through our first research experience. So CERF is for the formulation of what goes into a research project specifically for undergraduate researchers. I wanted to be part of the CERF program because of the professor of the project and the program itself. I think it's really useful for undergraduate students to have their first time research experience early so they have opportunity to figure out if graduate school or research are one of the potential choice for their future. Doing undergraduate research makes you a very strong candidate if you put it on your resume, if you put it on your CV, even if you don't plan to pursue research further, especially in CERF. If employers see that or potential employers see that you have CERF on your CV or resume, you are very attractive to them. My CERF experience has made me more confident that I want to pursue a PhD and graduate school in the future. I was always looking towards grad school but after doing this CERF program it is one of my top choices and top steps I will take after my undergraduate career is over. My Purdue CERF research project is a redesigned and prototype for scalable manufacturing of an isothermal nucleic acid detection device for infectious diseases. Our goal is to redesign a micro-rad that is able to detect HIV-1 from whole blood samples. We wish to decrease user interaction required and cost while at the same time increasing accessibility and affordability as well as ease of manufacturing. I'm working with Dr. Blomenschen about soft robotics specific with wine robot modeling. Since the local motion of soft robot haven't been understood yet, my work will be collecting a lot of presentable data and analyze them to help us and other researchers to build a soft robot local motion model. A lot of the application of soft robot are disaster rescue and a lot of them applicable in medical field since they have a greater flexibility compared to those rigid robot that we're traditionally use. The best thing of having a graduate mentor is you have someone to reach out to. Since I'm a first-time researcher and I'm also a sophomore, there's a lot of technical knowledge. I'm not really familiar in mechanical engineering. I want to be a graduate mentor because I realized that I really enjoyed helping students learn. I was a TA in my undergrad for three years and it was a really fun experience and my future trajectory is to hopefully be a professor so it's good to have that sort of foundation of knowledge to give me a good background in helping every student learn. In Dr. Agarwal's lab we focus on thin film photovoltaics or thin film solar cells and in particular we do solution processing of thin film photovoltaics. So we first annealed the ink onto our glass and then we're going to selenize it in a high temperature step and then we add the front and back contacts to make our final device. My surf project is using an ICCD camera to get an image of an hydrogen flame. This helps us better analyze the hydrogen flames as it can be used in the industry as an alternative fuel which is not produced carbon dioxide and can be as a green fuel being used in the industry. The surf program further influenced my career path and showing me that I can do more than just what I've previously done which was physics-based research and I can now do engineering, simulation research, build my patients and all around just built me as a better person. I really recommend the surf program because it is not only a full-time paid research position. It's also allowed to match with your skill level to whatever project it is. If you go on a surf website they have project list with professors description and also the skill that they require. So it's really easy for you to pair up with the project that you are comfortable working with. I think if you're curious about something that undergraduate research is really rewarding because you get to be the first person to know something about whatever you're passionate about and I think it's really easy to like fall in love with and especially because you can work at your own pace and kind of just drive your curiosity as far as it'll go.