Does That Involve Acoustics?
By John Boyle, Brigham Young University
Acoustics is HUGE and endlessly interesting. I enjoyed this conference because of the inherent interdisciplinary nature of every presentation and field of research. On paper, relatively few attendees could claim the title Acoustician or Professor of Acoustics. Musicians, surgeons, micro-biologists, marine biologists, geologists, linguists, engineers, federal crash investigators, shipbuilders, audiologists, you name it, they were at the conference.

Snow no match for students at the APS/AAPT Meeting
The record snowfall in the mid-Atlantic region last February did not deter hundreds of enthusiastic undergraduate physics students from descending on Washington, DC, for the 2010 APS/AAPT Joint Meeting. SPS had six dedicated oral sessions and a poster session, in which 75 (!) SPS members presented their research. Many more undergraduates participated in the specialized research sessions. During the SPS student awards reception, 21 presenters were honored with "Outstanding Paper" certificates and books donated by APS and AAPT.

Here are four compelling perspectives on the jam-packed week from SPS Reporters.

Leigha Dickens | Katie Foote | Erin Lease | David Neto

The 2009 AGU Fall Meeting
By Michael Towle, University of Memphis
Before I attended the Fall 2009 Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), my professors and fellow graduate students who had attended AGU in previous years gushed about how big it was. Sure, the official website stated that over 16,000 geophysicists would present their research. My mind has trouble processing and visualizing large numbers on a sheet of paper, so I thought, “How big could this rodeo actually get?” Upon arriving at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, I immediately discovered that AGU was incomprehensibly epic in scale.