Julian Berengut introducing Tony Travouillon’s postgraduate seminar.

This year saw the creation of a postgraduate Physoc (the physics students’ society) in the School of Physics – which will hopefully increase interactions between the School’s postgraduate students. The undergraduate Physoc has been highly successful for many years, with activities including BBQs and social functions playing a key role in assisting budding physicists to find their way, and providing them with a sense of community during their studies. While PhD students have always been a part of Physoc, their role has generally been relatively passive — by creating an active postgraduate Physoc we can increase the school’s sense of community and attract more young PhD students to join us.

Towards this goal, in June 2003 a postgraduate branch of Physoc was formed, and a new position on the existing Physoc executive was created (the “Postgraduate Representative”) to provide an interface between undergraduate and postgraduate branches. We hope for this fledgling postgrad Physoc to grow strongly in the coming years.

Further, as part of this drive to increase postgraduate student interaction within the school, a postgraduate seminar series was established in the second half of 2003, which was very successful. Thirteen talks were given by PhD students on subjects as varied as black hole cosmology and magnetism in biology.

The seminars, which ran every second week, were beneficial to all of the students. They gave enthusiastic students practice in giving talks, gave everyone the opportunity to see what the other students were doing, and importantly they gave a chance to meet regularly on a social basis, assisted by the attracting power of chips, beer and chocolate biscuits. We look forward to another great series, and continued growth of the postgraduate Physoc in 2004.

Julian Berengut, Jacinda Ginges, Ra Inta,
Tony Travouillon and Adam Micolich