Since one of the main goals of EPS Young Minds project is to connect young scientists among different physics fields, Prague section decided to organize students’ colloquiums named Physics Pizza Party: Students 4 students, where young scientists from different universities and research fields presented their research activities. These events prove to be very successful for three subsequent semesters: winter 2016, summer 2016 and winter 2017.
This semester we organized totally of four colloquiums. Three talks were from the research fields and one talk from the industry. Research talks presented results about study of the hypernuclei, nanotechnology and quantum walks. These talks were presented by the two PhD students (CTU in Prague and Czech Academy of Sciences) and by the one master student (CTU in Prague). In the order to broad our horizons outside purely academic talks, we invited one speaker from the modern software company. The speaker introduced modern project management methods used in the software development.
Although majority of invited speakers already presented their research activities in front of the experts in their respective fields, almost none of them had any experience with presenting in front of general audience that were not familiar with the topic. Despite of this fact, each talk was perfectly prepared, and therefore there was no problem to understand given topic. Each event was scheduled for about 60 minutes, but with discussion during and after presentation, average time of colloquiums was about 90 minutes and even more. According to the speakers it was very rewarding experience for them.
All four events were advertised in form of posters, which were placed in school buildings. For the purpose of inviting as many participants as possible, we also advertised it on our social sites, namely Facebook and Twitter. Thanks to this advertisement, our students’ colloquiums had large attendance. Average number of participants was around 30 students per one colloquium.
The Prague EPS Young Minds Section found these colloquiums rewarding, since this style of presentation “students for students” is still very rare in our country and we were one of the first who organized this style of colloquiums. According to the feedback from our participants, we concluded that our colloquiums were successful, since they were very positively rated by participants. Thanks to these positive feedback and high number of participants, we would like to continue with this activity – this is what students in Prague expect as well.