ATNF student symposium
The ATNF has a very successful graduate student program attracting students from around Australia and internationally. The students have the chance to use world-class facilities and have access to a much wider astronomical community. They also have an opportunity to develop public speaking skills by presenting their work at lunchtime meetings and at symposia. One of these is the annual ATNF student symposium.
The ATNF student symposium began in 1998 and allows higher degree students the opportunity to present their research to fellow students and staff. It also provides an excellent opportunity for students to catch up with old friends and to discuss their work with others in similar positions to themselves. There are a number of ways students can present their work:
Describe the thesis outline (for people just commencing in the current year);
Discuss the global results;
Discuss an interesting specific result;
Present a problem encountered in student research and initiate a discussion with the audience.
This year's symposium was held on 11 May at ATNF headquarters in Sydney. The speakers included Sydney-based students, students from the ACT and Victoria and visitors from Adelaide. The symposium was well attended with ATNF staff, other students and, most pleasing of all, university supervisors. It was very encouraging to see this level of support for the students and it provided a fantastic environment for a number of interesting questions and discussions to occur after many of the presentations.
There were 11 talks ranging from early thesis introductory talks through to talks from those who were close to submitting. They covered a wide variety of topics from a discussion on the current status and future progress of the upgrade of the software correlator for VLBI to the applications of wide-field VLBI observations. There was a presentation on a new type of inexpensive (Styrofoam!) telescope built here at ATNF to be used at the Australian SKA site at Mileura in Western Australia that will allow us to detect HI out to redshifts of 11.5! We also had presentations on millisecond and high magnetic field pulsars, structure of the Magellanic Stream, dwarf galaxies, extragalactic jets and plans to model the interaction between radio plasma and the warm-hot intergalactic gas/medium associated with filamentary galaxy distribution.
We were treated to a lovely feast for our lunch provided by the ladies from the canteen. For this we must thank Sylvia and Barbara from the canteen and also Phil Sharp from the workshop for helping set up the luncheon and serve the food. I also thank Ilana Klamer who co-organised the whole event.
Next year we hope to see many of our inter-state visitors back again as their presence was a great highlight and we look forward to hearing about new results from old and new students.
Katherine Newton-McGee
(Katherine.Newton-McGee@csiro.au)