Science and Technology News and Views, SATNAV for short, are a student-led bi-annual science magazine published at the University of Birmingham! New to the EPS Community and catering to a wide range of scientific tastes from Psychology to Quantum Physics. Treasurer Cecilia Caffrey tells us more.
As this is our first article to you we thought we’d introduce ourselves. We are Science and Technology News and Views: a student-led bi-annual science magazine published at the University of Birmingham! We cater to a wide range of scientific tastes from Psychology to Quantum Physics and everything in between.
At SATNAV we encourage creativity in expressing our, and your, interests in science. If you have an interest in scientific writing then this is a great opportunity to get some experience and practise. We both write our own pieces and accept submissions from the student population and beyond. As well as accepting written articles to the magazine, we also accept artwork and creative pieces.
We aim to create an informative, factual and interesting magazine with issues published at the end of the Autumn and Spring Terms.
Our Media
In the 2015-16 academic year we have produced two print issues with the themes of ‘Science of the Future’ in December 2015 and ‘Unsung Heroes’ in March 2016. These are distributed across the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, the Guild of Students, throughout the University of Campus campus and online via social media including our brand new website which went live in the Spring Term. Our full catalogue is also available online.
Our Events
As part of our journalistic and development programme we ran a number of events this year including:
We are also very grateful to have received invitations to events across campus including the Develop Your Society workshop evening where we met alumni experts from marketing and digital fields who shared their advice with us on effective communications and reputation building. A particular highlight for us was being invitation to Professor Dave Charlton’s Distinguished Lecture on the future of the CERN large hadron collider. Not only did we attend the lecture but SATNAV members were invited to take places at the intimate roundtable discussion prior to the lecture to ask more detailed questions to Professor Charlton, and also to the private dinner after the lecture. You can read our article on the evening in the EPS Student News and we hope to cover more events like this with the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences in the future!
Our members
SATNAV membership doubled from 2014/15 to 2015/16 with members contributing all the material for our latest issues. We have hosted whole-society socials to celebrate each issue going to print at the end of the terms, distributed print copies to our members first and organised a sci-fi cinema trip.
Our Awards and Accolades
We are delighted to announce SATNAV has been shortlisted for the Best Specialist Publication Award by the Student Publication Association and received sponsorship from Engineering UK for conducting outreach at the Big Bang Fair! We hope to bring you good news from the Student Publication Association in our next update.
EPS Society status
We are delighted to have received EPS Society status in February 2016, officially making us part of the EPS Community. We are looking forward to contributing more to our community and publicising the exceptional work of researchers, societies and schools at University of Birmingham.
Now that we are part of the EPS Community we are eligible for the annual EPS Societies’ Awards. If we have impressed you with our magazine please do nominate us!
If you are interested in becoming involved in SATNAV or would like to know more we’d love to hear from you. Please do get in touch via eps-community@contacts.bham.ac.uk.
With very best wishes,
Cecilia Caffrey
Treasurer 2015-16
