Roger Weber

Roughly 8,000 hours from now, I will be graduating. I will be leaving Penn with a bevy of experiences, a slightly different outlook and an Ivy League education - things that will, I hope, guide me well both in life and in this uncertain job market. Yet, despite all of this uncertainty, I am sure of one thing: whoever turns up as our graduation speaker next year will not influence my life that much.

Nanotechnology - a field that involves manipulating matter on the atomic scale - is helping scientists reshape the technological world by making things smaller and smaller. At Penn, though, the attention being paid to nanotechnology has never been bigger. So when the state announced earlier this month it was giving a $3.

Students, faculty and three distinguished speakers met at the Engineering school's Kanade Symposium yesterday to discuss the state of robotics and computer science and to honor the winner of one of the Franklin Institute's highest awards. The symposium, co-sponsored by Penn's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Laboratory and the Franklin Institute, featured speeches and culminated with an open house at which GRASP showed off its Levine Hall laboratory.

As engineering becomes an increasingly global profession, officials at the Engineering school say their students are going abroad more than ever before - but still not as much as they would like them to. Getting more students to go overseas is a tricky issue, they argue - and one that will require changing student perceptions about the feasibility of such opportunities.

A generous-paying job offer can mark a happy finale to a Penn education, but at the Engineering school, making sure students are ready can be a difficult task. With zealous recruiters, job-hungry students and a field changing faster than ever before, SEAS administrators and professors are now questioning how much weight to put on career-training in the school, one whose curriculum has long been rooted in teaching students fundamentals.

A pair of awards given by the Army Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research will give the Engineering School nearly $30 million in grant money over the next 10 years for robotics research, officials at the school said. The grants, which total $22 million and $7.

Life in a new city can be a challenging experience for any young college graduate. It's even more difficult when that city is on a different continent and doesn't even have so much as a street sign for guidance. Such was the experience for Jareau Wade, a 2007 Engineering alumnus who returned to Penn last week having spent much of the last year working a dream job that has tested the skills he learned as a Quaker - teaching much of what he learned at Penn to students at a startup school in Ghana.

For many students in the College, Barbara Woodford has a voice and a face you know, but a name you probably don't. To many, Woodford is simply the middle point between you and a meeting with your academic advisor, but she may be the most important person at the College office in Logan Hall, ensuring things run smoothly and giving visitors their first impression of Penn's staff.

Penn Electrical and Systems Engineering professor Nader Engheta received one of Penn Engineering's top honors on Wednesday. Engheta, who has been named one of the 50 most important leaders in science and technology in America by Scientific American magazine, was presented with the Heilmeier Faculty Award for Excellence in Research.

Despite weeks of research, students in one Electrical and Systems Engineering class are still pondering the best way to climb the fabled "Rocky steps" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Of course, their task is more difficult than it sounds: While climbing those stairs may be an easy trek for tourists, getting a robot to make the same jaunt isn't so simple.