Talking Physics

I think one of the best ways to engage students is to show them the potential career paths that they could follow.
We gather at the beginning of the year any ideas they have on a potential career they may be thinking about. We get some interesting ones like roller coaster designer.

 

We find a lot of students say engineering without realising how many different types of engineering there are.

It is the International Year of Sound so I will start with careers in acoustic engineering, audio engineering (R&D) and being an acoustical scientist.
We have some experience of this since every year we have students go on to study with Salford’s universities acoustic department.

We also visit Salford acoustics with first year A level students. There is an article in the March Classroom Physics magazine on careers in acoustics.

https://spark.iop.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/Classroom-Physics_March-2020_Final-Digital_compress_1.pdf

Salford acoustics have good information on careers on their website.

http://salfordacoustics.co.uk/careers2

So many different careers to explore in acoustics. The website has a lot of information and case studies of many of these career paths.
It is also has some great advice for students on choosing between STEM based or practitioner based courses.
I have already been sharing the information with our eight students studying maths, physics and music/music technology.
I will be telling all the students this week as the entry requirements do not require the study of musics and we have many students that study maths and physics and are interested in acoustics. The entry requirements are 112-120 UCAS points, including grade C in Mathematics, Physics or a numerate science.

https://beta.salford.ac.uk/courses/undergraduate/beng-acoustical-and-audio-engineering

 

NUSTEM have made some excellent career resources.
https://nustem.uk/careers/

I will be using these great career cards over the coming weeks

https://nustem.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/KS3-careers-postcards-for-download.pdf

Carol Davenport has made this video for the new ChatPhysics website

I covered medical physics as a career. We are very lucky to be able to take our students to the Christie Medical Physics Evening

 

This is a great evening to see how there are many valuable careers working as a medical physicist.
We usually get to pick from the following areas

Over the years I have seen most of these areas and they all have some great teaching ideas to share with you.
For example when we did ultrasound one year we saw how ultrasound is used for imaging and the breaking up of kidney stones. We also heard how ultrasound can be used in water treatment plants to break up rocks and also can assist with the flocculation of fine organic matter. I did not know that ultrasonic knives are used to cut cream cakes.

I also teach Btec applied science and the medical physics unit covers ultrasound. Ultrasound is also one of the first places students come across the idea of impedance matching.

Steve Mould has a really good YouTube channel for both teachers and students. He covers this very well.
Every visit we get some more good physics to talk about. We have been doing interference with the students recently and it was great to have a great example. We saw how a gamma ray or X-ray beam could target a cancer.

A patient in this machine will be breathing so the tumour is moving its position in a rhythmic way.

A system of cameras, lasers and projectors can analysis the interference pattern and alter the gamma ray beam to stay focused on the tumour.

We also have worn lead filled aprons before and last time got to push a lead filled door.

 

It was recently World Health day and @IOPTeaching tweeted this great careers video from IPEM

I also showed the students this career profile. This career path is also open to students studying Btec Science.

http://www.iop.org/resources/qubit/september-2019/page_72998.html

Physics world has a really good article on the various areas of medical physics

https://physicsworld.com/a/medical-physics-a-broad-spectrum-of-careers/

A more recent article tells of how physicists are at the heart of the fight against Covid-19.

https://physicsworld.com/a/covid-19-how-physics-is-helping-the-fight-against-the-pandemic/

This article was interesting as we had just been studying diffraction gratings. It was great to show how physicists use X-rays to ascertain the structure of viruses. I also showed them a laser shone through a helical filament

The diffraction pattern looked a lot better than in the photograph. I then showed them a picture of Rosalind Franklins discovery

http://cen.xraycrystals.org/dna.html

We then had a look at some courses

https://www.cumbria.ac.uk/study/courses/undergraduate/healthcare-science/

https://digital.ucas.com/coursedisplay/courses/53eed7b5-f712-f02f-e8a0-ab5a6d6ff5ac?academicYearId=2020&courseOptionId=209819f1-14fd-43ca-9b4e-22e8c1b60d2b

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ugstudy/course/Physics-with-Medical-Physics-BSc

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ugstudy/course/Physics-with-Medical-Physics-BSc

 

 

 

 

As mentioned above Nustem have some excellent careers resources
https://nustem.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/KS3-careers-postcards-for-download.pdf

It was great to see this video by Lewis Matheson (@legophysicsguy)
My own students have been really benifiting from Lewis’s videos.

We run a trip to CERN for students and one of the things they see is a lot of different potential careers. CERN has physicists, engineers, programmers and mathematicians all working to run one of the largest engineering projects.
NUSTEM with the STFC have now released a set of KS3 careers in particle physics cards

You can download the cards here
https://nustem.uk/careers-postcards/

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