Trying to find the end of your project report and planning the Inaugural Employability Symposium

With the exams that marked the end of term fast becoming a distant memory, the mass exodus for Easter has reduced the campus to a refuge for those engrossed in dissertations or revision. I fall into the first camp, now trying to piece together the past 20 weeks of project work into a coherent report. It’s exciting watching it develop, refining any gaps in background knowledge and scrutinizing the assumptions made in every statement. Though only a modest contribution to low temperature physical chemistry, placing the final draft on my bookshelf will be my greatest achievement of my degree so far, and it’s been a great insight into a research area I’m eager to pursue further.

Alongside this, myself and another committee member of the I-Science Society have been piecing together the arrangements for the Inaugural Employability Symposium, taking place the second week of the final term. The idea here is to build on the academic seminars the society hosts throughout the year through an afternoon of speakers from industry and alumni. To achieve this, we’ve recruited the help of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science and the Career Development Service, and through a host of meetings it looks like it’s really going to happen! So for the last for weeks we’ve been booking rooms, writing risk assessments and grant forms, searching out alumni, making posters on interdisciplinary PhDs and internships, pitching to potential speakers, calling every company in areas of interest to students for promotional material, budgeting a lunch buffet, expenses forms, writing feedback forms, organising preparatory sessions…Let’s just hope everyone turns up! I’m  hoping to make it back down south for a few days before the holidays are up, once the final few uncertainties of the event are laid to rest.

On another note, funnily enough one of my Journal of Interdisciplinary Special Topics papers was picked up by the Daily Mail. Having your work misquoted in this newspaper feels like a key stepping stone in any scientist’s career, so if that’s not an achievement I don’t know what is!