It wasn't Marcio Von Muhlen's choice to come to the United States initially, but after being here for a while with his parents, he didn't want to go back home.

"I was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil which is at the very south part of Brazil close to Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay," the student says. "I came to the United States when my parents got a job here at the beginning of high school.' That was about 8 years ago, the student says.

When high school was over, his father returned to Brazil. But Marcio says, "I decided to stay primarily because of the education opportunities and knowing that I could attend a great university like UC Berkley where I could have an incredible opportunity that I would not have had in Brazil."

Aside from his regular classes, Marcio works with two other bioengineering students on a medical device called the MicroJet injector. The device administers drugs like a hypodermic needle, but without the pain.

He says working on the project has made him feel that he can tackle difficult problems. "One great thing about UC Berkley is that because it is such a world famous research institution, there are all kinds of research projects available for undergraduates to work on," Marcio says.

"You wouldn't see that in other places," he notes, "but I was afforded the opportunity to work on this project and I even got paid to do it through a program that the department of bioengineering called the Summer Bioengineering Research Program. They basically give you a living stipend so you can hang around campus and be in the lab and get acquainted with a research project and see what research is all about and see if you like it."

Marcio says by working on the project, he not only did gained experience, he also a few accolades. He notes that he and the other 2 students on the research team won awards and traveled to conferences to discuss their work.

"It has really paid off for me to kind of take that next step and not just be satisfied with the classes and the core curriculum that I had to take coming to Berkley to graduate," he says.

When it comes to being a foreign student in the United States, Marcio says, "coming to the U.S. is a wonderful, wonderful experience and most definitely worth it. It is very tough at first when you get here and you don't really know what is going on," he says, "but at the same time there are always people who are ready to welcome you here."

"Everywhere I have gone there have always been people there who welcome foreigners," Marcio says, noting that the United States is a nation of immigrants. "If you look back far enough pretty much everyone who is here now is an immigrant," he says.

The U.C. Berkley student says anyone who is planning to come to the U.S. to study should "expect to work hard, expect to face challenges that you would not have faced at home."

He says "values can be very different here than they are other places, not that they are better or worse, they are just different and you have to get use to them. [You don't have to] necessarily incorporate them into your own life, but just be able to deal with it, and then you will be fine."