As part of a developing SCOPE tradition, we welcomed, on October, 12 2017, new and not so new students to SCOPE with a start-of-the-semester social night.
Thanks to our EPS Young Minds grant, we were able to provide some food and drinks for the event and attracted about 30-35 students to our department’s common room in the evening. We started off with a short introduction to our student chapter and the activities that we are involved in during the year, in particular the upcoming chapter committee elections which was the centre of our recruitment efforts of the night.
After this official beginning, the rest of the evening was focused on networking, meeting and exchanging experiences with other students within the university. For the SCOPE committee, it was particularly also a good opportunity to find out more what kind of activities our members are interested in.
Throughout the night, we distributed our chapter business cards and had information and sign-up sheets for our mailing list displayed to fill in.
Although still a bit early to tell – as elections have not taken place yet -, our recruitment evening was very successful. A large number of new PhD and Master students attended with some very interested in our activities and how to officially join the chapter. A small number of undergraduate students also attended the event; this is a very positive sign, as we have recently increased our collaboration with the very undergraduate-oriented Physics Society at Strathclyde University in order to broaden our membership base further.
Overall, around ten people signed up to join our mailing list with some also already attending our follow-up event to the Welcome Night, a Career Evening at the end of November. As most current members of the SCOPE committee will step down this year due to their studies coming to an end, this event was very important for us in order to increase SCOPE’s visibility among students and ensure that we can find enough members for the new committee; we hope to have succeeded in this goal.
