Final year Physics student, and member of Kent’s PLANCKS team Snails3, Anthony Quinlan tells us more about the plans to host the national event, and how you can get involved.
You may remember in the last newsletter I announced that Kent would be hosting the UK preliminaries of PLANCKS. I’m here today to tell you a bit more about it, share our ideas and hopefully convince some of you to help run the event.
PLANCKS is an international theoretical physics competition for undergraduate and masters students, each year the UK selects three teams to participate in the international final. Back in 2019, a team from Kent was lucky enough to go to this final in Denmark, at this event I was approached by a representative of the International Association of Physics Students who asked if Kent would like to host the UK preliminaries of this event.
This year the University of Edinburgh hosted the UK preliminaries, giving us an excellent opportunity to find out what works and what to avoid when running an event of this scale. Edinburgh saw nearly 120 of the UK’s top theoretical physics students and with the competitions growing popularity, we’re expecting an even greater interest than this year especially as the final in 2021 will be held in Portugal. After the weekend, the team fed back to our new organising committee who has already started planning the activities that Kent will put on.
Our organising committee is comprised of a mixture of fourth year students, third year students, PhD students, members of the public engagement committee and academics. We’ve been hard at work planning the events of the weekend from the exam, to academic talks to the silly activities (Morris dancing….) that give people to opportunity to meet and connect with other students from around the country.
This is truly a fantastic event not just for the participants but for Kent, it’s an opportunity to show off our university and the research carried out here.
If you are interested in helping to organise or volunteer for the event please email (kentplancks@gmail.com), we are always open to new ideas and assistance.