IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - September 2021 - 74

by Renan Pillon Barcelos, Nayara Brandão de Freitas, Indhumathi Gunasekaran,
Harish Sarma Krishnamoorthy, and Joseph P. Kozak
IEEE PELS Students and Young Professionals
Symposium: A New Venture!
he IEEE Power Electronics
Society (PELS) constantly
strives to bring new and
improved products as well as events,
which are relevant to the current
needs of its members and future
trends of technology. One of the latest
endeavors in this regard is the
IEEE PELS Students and Young Professionals
Symposium (SYPS),
which had its inaugural edition virtually
in March 2021. The event was
planned by the PELS Students' and
Young Professionals' (SYP) committee
and conducted by its student
activities committee members, along
with more than 50 passionate volunteers
promoting a student-focused,
truly global PELS conference.
The event was based on three main
pillars, as shown in Table 1. The focus
of creating such an event was to connect
PELS members and technology enthusiasts
into one platform to network,
learn, teach, share ideas and participate
in the PELS volunteering world.
First Edition-PELS SYPS 2021
In 2021, the SYPS committee selected
the theme " Let's Step Up to TransDigital
Object Identifier 10.1109/MPEL.2021.3099549
Date of current version: 13 September 2021
T
form " to segregate the track days.
With this in mind, the SYPS committee
chose three topics (tracks);
The first day of the event was
all about " Boosting renewables and
transportation systems, " where there
were exceptional presentations about
the industry and academia's latest developments.
All the presentations represented
the high-level content that
the student needs to mold his/her career
as a power electronics engineer.
On the second day, the track was
titled " Unlocking the power of tomorrow " .
The activities and presentations
focused on motivating the upcoming
professionals to enrich and ignite
their skills.
The " Industry connection " was the
theme for the third day, where there
were four panel discussions and a job
fair. The SYPS team and the industry
partners created job opportunities via
the Virtual Job Fair and talks with HR
specialists during the day.
SYPS'21: Diversity and Inclusion:
A priority for diversity and inclusion
was established for both the team and
speakers. We selected our team and
speakers focusing on giving space for
growth and opportunity to everyone.
The inclusion of multicultural people
Worldwide Connection
Table 1. Three pillars of the PELS SYPS 2021.
Meet Industry Leaders
IEEE PELS SYPS'21 was an International virtual
symposium where student members, young
professionals, and tech enthusiasts passionate
about exploring more on power electronics from
all around the world met under one platform.
Delegates had the opportunity to network with
like-minded people from almost everywhere in
the world while staying at home.
Economic fallout due to the coronavirus
outbreak keeps sending shock waves to the
vast majority of industries in the world. PELS
SYPS'21 opened the doors for its members and
participants to meet industry leaders from
around the world, and it was the best time to
hear from them on their concerns throughout
the pandemic.
74 IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE z September 2021
in our team promotes a huge experience
for the volunteers involved. This
unique experience helps dispel negative
stereotypes and personal biases about
others. Figure 1 shows the number of
volunteers in our committee and the
speakers for each region by gender.
Even with the results that we achieved
from our efforts, we feel that have
much more room for improvement.
From the speaker's point of view, we
believe that we have reached our goal.
However, in terms of volunteers, we
want to attract many more from regions
1 to 9 to participate and integrate society
students' activities. We believe that
events like the SYPS will highlight the
benefits of being an active volunteer in
PELS, and we hope more students join
us next year. We also request the PELS
membership community to step forward
and help us in this regard.
Attendance and Feedback
The event had 428 registrations with
338 participants on the event platform.
The average time per viewer was
above fifty minutes, which suggests
that most of the attendees stayed for
the long duration of the sessions without
leaving the page. These numbers
can be considered very good for a
virtual conference, especially in the
Have Some Fun
It might be too exhausting to cycle
around the same boring daily routine in
everyday life for nearly a year. IEEE PELS
SYPS'21 provided an excellent venue to
step into a fresh start and feel motivated
once again-meeting new people, new
ideas, and figuring out how exciting life
can be.
IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - September 2021

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