Friday, August 3, 2018
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If you were to walk around the Renaissance Hotel this week, you would find it filled with physicists on a mission. It was the AAPT Summer Meeting, which was (fortuitously for us) in DC! I haven’t been to an AAPT Meeting before, and what a shame I haven’t; I had so much fun. It’s not very often you get to be in a crowd of physicists, and it’s especially rare to be in a sea of physics teachers. There was everything from the biggest demo show I’ve ever seen, to poster sessions, to a plenary with Shirley Malcolm, to invited talks from leading scientists in the field to see what’s new in the world of astronomy.
A few of us interns went to LabEscape, which is exactly what it sounds like. A fun science version of an escape room. We had a blast and it only took us an extra few minutes on top of the hour we were given to finish the challenge. I think the group did a fabulous job putting it on, and considering we were the first group at the AAPT meeting to go through it, the timing was pretty spot on.
Also at the meeting, I got the opportunity to give a talk for SPS about the best practices on conducting outreach! It was an hour session on Tuesday morning. It was intimate, and I was lucky to have the room filled with the SPS support of Brad, James, Michael, and Phoebe. In the planning process, I struggled with formatting this information to fit the wide breadth of possible audience members, so it was a great learning experience for me on how to adapt content based on the level of experience with outreach and how they fit into it as an educator or student. I am grateful that the SPS National team trusted me to represent them in this aspect.
Beyond this personal connection, I love physics meetings for the opportunities to feed my extroverted scientist and connect with others. Advice to future students: when you go to a conference, put yourself out there. Very often you will have a fair amount of free time that could and should be spent talking with others. These meeting are for networking! With a combination of being introduced by others and going in to extra sessions that were designed to connect with others, I got to have conversations with PER (physics education research) graduate students, several professors working in PER, physics high school teachers, and other undergraduate SPS students.
Amanda Williams