It was Saturday but, nonetheless, the city train had been boggled with a definite sort of people: men and women dressed in business attire, fumbling and slipping with long awkward poster tubes. Wearing a new button-up shirt and pleated khakis, I ambled out of Peachtree Centre station and squeezed a path through the bustling crowd and hotel skyscrapers. The October air was cool (back home in Arizona we would've called it 'freezing'); it rumbled of clacking feet and automobiles; it smelled of car fumes, wet asphalt and, if one tried, a hint of morning espresso. I picked up a coffee from a street vendor and soon found myself in Centennial Olympic Park surrounded by grass (not Arizonan dirt and cacti but actual green grass). That's when I caught my first glimpse -- the Georgia World Congress Centre bustling with people beneath a billboard size banner reading "Welcome Society for Neuroscience 2006." I stood in awe; "How on earth had I ended up here, at the largest neuroscience conference in the world. Who in their right mind, actually trusted that I, Clayton Mosher, actually knew a thing about anything, let alone neuroscience!?" A passerby bumped me, I spilled coffee on myself, and hence I proceed along a path to my very first international conference.

Roughly 24,000 people attended the Society for Neuroscience conference in Atlanta, Georgia this October. Thanks to the UBRP travel funds program, I was one of those people, one of very few fortunate undergraduates amongst some of the brightest minds of our time. On the first day of the conference, I presented my UBRP summer work in a four-hour poster session on "Behavior and Emotion." I was both surprised and excited to find several researchers interested in my study and received extensive input that left my mind eager to run more experiments and analyze my data in novel ways. While I was nervous at the beginning of the session, by the end of the session I felt quite comfortable with presenting my poster, and am thankful for the opportunity.

In the following four days, I visited numerous posters and listened to several lectures on neuroscience, ranging from other emotional/behavioral studies to studies on synaesthesia to research on the neural correlates of vision. I spoke with many researchers from all parts of the world and learned about the broad expanse of the field of neuroscience. On the last day of the conference I visited the different vendors and learned a bit about the products used in modern neuroscience (not to mention, I picked up a few notepads, pens, and other vendor freebees!).

Outside of the regular 8:00-5:00 conference hours, I experienced some of the great food of Atlanta and spent time with graduate students from the University of Arizona as well as from other colleges throughout the States. We talked, strolled through downtown Atlanta, and chatted with some of the locals. Everyone in Atlanta was friendly and ready to help.

Attending the Society for Neuroscience conference greatly solidified my desire to pursue a career in scientific research. While I was certainly just a small number in the 24,000 attendees, I nonetheless was able to contribute something to the scientific community. More so, I was provided with an experience in the art of poster presentation, learned much about other neuroscience fields, and gained insight about new ways to explore my own research.

Clayton Mosher, UBRPer, Dr. Katalin Gothard's lab, Physiology