Connecting Worlds

“Whew, what a weekend!” That’s what I remember thinking as I sat on my flight home from last fall’s Quadrennial Physics Congress (PhysCon) in Orlando. The three days were filled with activities: six outstanding plenary speakers, two special lunchtime speakers, six workshops, sixty exhibitors, nearly two hundred undergraduate research posters, an art competition, a special tour of the Kennedy Space Center (alligators, eagles, and launchpads, oh my!), and Club Congress (a killer physics dance party) on Saturday night. Based on the conversations that I had with many of the attendees and others that I overheard while walking around the convention center, I am confident that all the students who attended returned to their home campus with an expanded enthusiasm for their studies and are kick-starting outreach activities in their own departments. I can’t wait to read the annual chapter reports from this year.

While we were able to share the excitement of physics with some six hundred undergraduate physics majors, this is only a small fraction of physics majors in the United States. We want to develop the same enthusiasm in all of those who were not able to attend. This is where Sigma Pi Sigma and the Society of Physics Students have been working very diligently since the Congress. I wanted to take some time to share with you some of our strategies for spreading the word.

A program that has been particularly useful in sharing information about what happens at professional meetings is our Student Reporter program. For many years now, we’ve sent undergraduate students to national physics meetings of organizations such as The American Physical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and others, to write stories for SPS publications. This year, due to the generosity of a number of people and organizations, we were able to help support several teams of student reporters to attend PhysCon. Each team was assigned to interview and provide reports on speakers, workshops, or other PhysCon events. The reports are starting to make their way into our publications. We have several excerpts in this issue of Radiations, and there are several others in the Society of Physics Student’s most recent issue of The SPS Observer (head over to