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Greetings Physicists!

It’s time to get your summer job, and as a physicist, your options are wide open, but the deadlines are flying past:

1. Policy internships: John Mather, the 2007 physics Nobel Prize winner, has seen fit to support undergraduate congressional interns in collaboration with SPS! http://www.spsnational.org/programs/internships/
2. Research internships: in physics & other sciences, at NASA and in Hawaii—search for your summer job at www.the-nucleus.org, click on “summer research”
3. Teaching internships: like the one at MIT called TOPS, www.the-nucleus.org
4. Science Outreach internships: like the ones here at the SPS national office, deadline February 1! See http://www.spsnational.org/

RUN! Help guide the future of SPS by nominating someone you respect (yourself, for example!) for the SPS governing Council, deadline Feb. 15th http://www.spsnational.org/governance/

APPLY! for an SPS Leadership scholarship, Scholarship deadline is February 15th! From $2000 to $5000, future teacher scholarship and more, see http://www.spsnational.org/programs/scholarships/

LASERFEST has started! In January, 2010, we set off on a yearlong celebration—the 50th anniversary of the invention of the laser. The Society of Physics Students has joined in this effort by selecting as its 2010 theme “Exciting the imagination”.  This theme was chosen by the council members at its 2009 National Council Meeting for its holistic, yet simple message: That while the laser is unarguably the tangible product of human minds, it was the imagination (and dedication) of its creators that brought it into being. The LASERFEST website has a lot of cool stuff, images, interviews, games, event calendars—check it out, http://www.laserfest.org/

STILL haven’t grabbed your chapter’s Galileoscope yet? Your advisor or a chapter officer can request one of these cool telescopes for free at http://www.spsnational.org/getagalileoscope/, letting y’all see what Galileo saw—moons of Jupiter, rings of Saturn, etc…  

Take care, Gary

PS:

BTW, I’m teaching a class this semester, as I do occasionally to keep me humble, and we started with film classic Powers of Ten—(here’s the original version, free, http://vimeo.com/819138, the newer versions appear to cost money). Note especially the spacey music, which shouts SEVENTIES in the best way.

It’s exhilarating and exhausting to be teaching again; the energy of the students and the uniqueness of physics teaching reminds me how lucky I am to have stumbled across that first intro class using Sears and Zemansky in college, and to have learned from Vincent Genusa, Ron Smith, Kathleen Drude, Patricia Giangrossso, Carolyn Minder, Pete Shugart, Charles Smith, Charles Finley, John Myers, Louis Bedell, and many other great teachers/professors at NE La U.

Gary White
Director, Sigma Pi Sigma and Society of Physics Students
Assistant Director of Education
American Institute of Physics
One Physics Ellipse
College Park, MD 20740
Tel: 301-209-3007
FAX: 301-209-0839