Joe Hegarty shares their experience - With over 200 attendees it was rather daunting but I believe we made the best of it. The talks we attended ranged from presentations on reactive distillation controllability, removal of biofilms, nanobubbles and much more. Although there were some presentations that were too advanced for us to understand, they were all valuable. Being able to see the wide range of applications of chemical engineering in real life and the current developments was so interesting. Neither Luca nor myself realised how chemical engineering was changing the pharmaceutical industry (helping them make the switch to batch or continuous) and we found out about these developments multiple times per day.

Of the presentations one of the most important for us was one on aqueous biphasic systems, the very same topic we had worked on. This presentation was looking at the kinetics of our system in detail, something that is almost completely unknown at the time of writing, and was hoping to eventually make the extraction method continuous. The talk on it was great for us, we simultaneously realised that we knew more than we thought about the topic, but also that there was so much more to learn. Understanding how much depth there is to the things we had learnt was a vital part of the conference for the both of us and one of the biggest things we were able to take away from it.

The poster presentations was the most important part for us, it was why we attended in the first place. We were there to try and show off our research and make the most of the opportunities, I believe we succeeded. There was always a steady stream of people that wanted us to talk through our poster. We started off a little shaky, we were worried about not being able to answer advanced questions but by the end of it we were confident, professional and people were always surprised to find out we were undergraduates. Our poster attracted enough interest that we were able to make connections with many academics, all of whom have said to contact them if we are ever considering a PhD.

Much to our disappointment, we did not win any prizes for our poster; however, some of the projects that won were so interesting. We learnt so much in those two days, presentation skills, networking, and the relevance of what we were learning. Speaking to PhD students, post docs and even heads of department from different universities gave us a different perspective and helped us both work out what we aim to do in the future.