This year we flew 15 people up north to visit Argonne National Labs! From one busy city to another, our members stopped by the Adler Planetarium and Shedd Aquarium for some stunning sights. While the flight back home was… quite the story, the rest of the trip went pretty much …
We don’t always have to go far away to see cool physics labs. Right here in Atlanta we have our very own proton accelerator at the Emory Proton Center! There they use protons to treat cancer since these particles uniquely deposit larger amounts of energy the less kinetic energy they have. This means the treatment does less damage to surrounding tissue than others. So many students came out that were interested in medical physics, they were lucky to be able to speak to real medical physicist and we even learned of internship opportunities for the attendees! The coolest part of the tour was seeing the gantry the beam enters the room on, there were multiple very powerful dipole and quadrupole magnets along the beam-line, what a treat.
It only comes every four years: PHYSCON! Officers Robin Glefke and Jess Eskew worked hard to organize this trip all the way from Atlanta to Providence, RI. In total ten students attended and in turn got to miss a few days of class. They were able to take tours of Brown, Harvard, and MIT, attend speakers from the field, and even have a specially catered lunch with field professionals. One of the most exciting parts of the trip was definitely corraling that many people across the country; we took a cab, then a train, then a bus to get to our destination and back. On the return, one of the attendees, Krish Tibrewala, almost didn’t make it back! How terrifying!
We had so much fun in Huntsville this fall. We got a tour of their plasma labs thanks to a personal connection from secretary Robin Glefke. New member Xandy Xiamecki was also able to get us a meeting with various faculty since he is a recent transfer from the UHA. Lunch in their student center proved GT’s dining halls far inferior! We also took a tour of the Marshall Space Flight Center and found out one of our members, historian Ryan Gemeliere, went to space camp here and was featured on the center’s walls and in a documentary about space camp! Wow. This was also the first trip where we decided to stay at an AirBNB and it was SO NICE. Never again will we slum it in cheap motels. We finished the trip with a dinner together at this wonderful hole-in-the-wall pizza place with excellent garlic knots.
This year we went to Knoxville for the bi-annual SPS trip. While originally we had planned to visit Oak Ridge National Labs, circumstances out of our control kept us from doing so, but that did not stop us from having fun! We went hiking through a stream in the nearby Great Smokey Mountains National Park. A few of us also ended up hitchhiking a few miles up the park road after collecting some overexcited members that had gone the wrong way! The fields were beautiful and the fresh air was good for us to recuperate from our hard work during classes. We also explored the city of Knoxville. There were many cute bookstores, thrift stores, and eerie (but delicious) ice cream shoppes. On the ride to and from our destination, different groups took side adventures to the Knoxville Art Museum, a water filled quarry, a flea market, and MANY trips to Starbucks.
This year for the Spring Trip, SPS went to Philly! While in Philadelphia we went to The Franklin Institute as a group, then we all split off into separate groups to explore the city. Some people went to the art museum, some went to see the liberty bell, and some went to the park and found…occult things. The next day we all went to the Princeton Plasma Physics lab and saw stellarators and fusion chambers. unfortunately the trip was cut short because an incredible snow storm swept across the northeast and we fled home to Georgia as quickly as possible to avoid being trapped.
