Community
NeurotechX and its student club (found one if the campus lacks it), BMES and IEEE EMBS, the BCI Society, the OpenBCI forum, Neuromatch's network, BioUtah. Where the people are, and why showing up works.
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Almost everything good that happened to people in this field happened because they were in a room, or a channel, with the right people, and asked a question. Here are the rooms.
NeurotechX
The global neurotechnology community: a Slack with thousands of members, local chapters in many cities, and a student club program that runs hackathons, sends speakers, and connects clubs to companies. If the University of Utah has a chapter, join it the first week. If it does not, founding one is a first-year-sized project: three friends, a faculty sponsor, the NeurotechX student club application, and a first meeting where you demonstrate alpha tug-of-war. The club then becomes your venue for the Phase 3 play projects, your team for the hackathons, and the reason companies know your name. Clubs that run one hackathon a year with a real sponsor produce internships.
BMES and IEEE EMBS
The Biomedical Engineering Society and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Student membership in each is cheap and gives you the conferences at student rates (BMES in October has a large undergraduate poster session; EMBC in July has peer-reviewed short papers), the job boards, and the student chapters on campus, which run the industry visits. Join both in year one; present at one by year three.
The BCI Society
The field’s own professional society, small enough that a student can talk to anyone at its biennial meeting. Student membership is inexpensive and the meeting’s abstract deadline is on the calendar. This is where the people whose papers you reproduced in Phase 3 are.
The OpenBCI forum and GOSH
The OpenBCI forum is where hobbyist and research-lite EEG problems get solved in public; searching it answers most Phase 1 and 2 questions, and asking a well-formed question there (with a plot and your setup) gets thoughtful help. The Gathering for Open Science Hardware is the broader open-instrument community, useful once you are building rigs for labs.
Neuromatch
Your pod and your teaching assistant from Neuromatch Academy are a network; keep the group chat alive. The broader Neuromatch community runs conferences and matching events.
BioUtah
The state’s life sciences association. Its events (the annual summit, the regular networking nights, the regulatory workshops) are open, and a first-year student attending is rare enough to be remembered. Go with a one-sentence description of what you have built and ask three people what they work on. Its member directory is the list of every device company in Utah.
Online
r/neuralengineering and r/BCI for news and questions; the Neurotech Reports newsletter for industry; the arXiv and bioRxiv feeds for preprints in the relevant categories; and a few researchers and engineers worth following on whatever platform they post to. Keep it to an hour a week; the bench is the point.
How to show up
Ask one question at every talk. Introduce yourself to three people at every event with a specific sentence about what you have built. Follow up the next day with one line and a link to a build log. Offer to help with something (running the club’s hackathon registration, taking notes at the meeting). The people who become known in a field are the ones who were reliably useful in rooms, not the ones who were impressive once.
- Week one: join or found the NeurotechX club. Join BMES and IEEE EMBS as a student.
- Month one: attend one BioUtah event. Three introductions.
- Year one: demonstrate a Phase 3 play project at a club meeting.
- Year two: run or help run a hackathon. Join the BCI Society.
- Year three: present a poster at BMES or the BCI Society meeting.