What a year it’s been! We’ve had too many events to talk about all of them individually but they include the highly-anticipated BUMS vs NucSoc Snobs, Halloween pub golf, joint events with oSTEM, and a games night with Mario Kart, FIFA, card games (4 students including myself even stayed until past midnight completing Super Mario Bros in 4 hours!) 80’s themed bar-crawl, the Harborne Mile with MathSoc, and a trip to see the film ‘Hidden Figures’ with WISE.
One thing we can say for sure is we’ve really worked on inter-society relationships within the societies in Engineering and Physical Sciences and have had a great time getting to know students from the College.
As always though we started the year off with our Freshers’ Welcome House Party; this really brings together students together from across the years and gives first years an informal setting to get to know their mentors. It really cements the relationships and is partly responsible for our successful mentoring scheme.
As a student society we also focus on careers opportunities and this starts with our summer placement talks aptly named as ‘Students Talk About Their Summer Placements’. Seven students talked about a range of placements, from teaching physics to working on the fusion reactor at JET with of course free donuts. Then a week later the MetMat careers fair came around.13 companies including Rolls Royce, Culham, MTC and many others from the materials and nuclear sectors presented and mixed with our students. This was very useful opportunity for students and a great networking event.
But then our largest event was the ever-popular Christmas meal! This year over 80 students and staff embarked on the Selly Park Tavern for 3 courses of very good food and the NucSoc elves made an appearence! This was a great end to our first term and a nice chance to relax before the many deadlines over the Christmas break.
With second term comes the looming threat of exams, project work and deadlines, but NucSoc is here to distract from all that! We started the term with our first trip to industry. 30 students travelled down to Oxford to visit the Diamond Light Source facility. This was a great informative day and gave us a brilliant insight into what research is like in industry compared to labs at university.
The biggest night of the year is of course the Materials Ball organised jointly with BUMS. Once again we graced the University’s Great Hall with our presence; a great night was had by all and it was the talk of the department for many weeks afterwards.
For our last event of second term, we hosted another popular quiz night but all proceeds went to the charity Mind. This was highly successful and tense up until the last round where a team of first years swooped in to take first place from a team of fourth years! Pizza was provided by the societies and we raised an amazing £265.21!
Finally, I am happy to announce that the committee for 2017/18 is:
President: Sarah Talbot
Vice-President: Amy Cunningham
Social Secretaries: Dan Wright and Sunchi Chen
Secretary: Alexandra Carapcea
Treasurer: Fred Chanter
Careers Rep: Callum Hobrough
On a personal note: I’ve had such an amazing time on the NucSoc committee these past 3 years from first year rep to president and would like to wish everyone good luck for exams and am so excited to see what NucSoc does next!
We’ve truly gone from strength to strength this year and after narrowly missing out on an EPS Societies’ Award last year, we want to take a trophy home! To do this we need your help. Please nominate us! As always #NucSocBestSoc
Nicole Soor
President 2016/17