Ever since I graduated, I’ve been quite fond of May.  It’s a nice quiet month in the University, good for getting things done, and the weather is often nice.  Obviously during my degree, I appreciated very little of this as I spent every second in the library trying desperately to pass my exams and the weather seemed nice to spite me – which is where all the students have vanished to now.  In outreach, there are few school visits as school pupils are suffering from the same problem and have mostly gone on study leave by now.

This leaves me with plenty of time in the office to get caught up with things before the June/July rush of activity.  Well, that was the plan.  All the other education organisations seem to have had the same idea and I have actually ended up spending two weeks straight going from meeting to meeting as everyone else tries to prepare for the rest of the summer.  Off the back of these meetings, I can tell you that the next ASE conference (4th-7th Jan 2012) will have lots of interesting sessions for teachers and will be doing free exhibition only passes again, the SEPnet GCSE events (running at Surrey on 27th-29th June) will all run smoothly and many pupils in the region will get a chance to have a go at the bike powered disco and much more.

From 20th June, our schools activities in the department really get going with 3-4 events on campus a week, hundreds of pupils will be visiting over the course of a month.  These pupils will range in age from 13-18 and take part in activities such as lectures, tours, competitions, problem solving challenges and practical sessions in our UG labs. 

As we near the end of May it is T -3 weeks to having all these activities organised and arranging for people to run them all.  Now where did I put that checklist?