Every year our final-year MPhys students give short talks on what they did during their Research Years. The Research Year is around 11 months doing real leading edge research. All our MPhys students do this after 2½ taught years. After the Research Year they come back for a final ½ taught year, then graduate. This year we filmed some of the students, and Paddy Regan, the academic who runs it. The video is now on YouTube.

There is a map of the locations mentioned by the students. The geographic spread was from California and Vancouver in the west to Clausthal (Germany) in the east. Of the 7 students in the video 5 did their years overseas and 2 in the UK.

One of our students visited 12 states of the USA during his placement. Things have changed a lot since I did my final year research. This was in the Chemistry Department at the University of Sheffield. To be fair that was 20 years ago now. I only got as far as the top floor of the Chemistry Department, and I only got that far because that was where the theoretical chemistry groups were.

But some things do not change. The excitement of getting your first research results and the pure enthusiasm this generates. I still remember going into his office and telling my then boss that I got the computer program to work and generalised it to allowing for rotating molecules. I was working on using computers to study simple models of molecules like the ones in natural gas.

The enthusiasm comes across in the video, and its impressive that maybe 14 months before it was filmed they probably didn’t know what a ‘mixed symmetry state’ of a nucleus is (I don’t, its not my field) and there they are casually talking about working on understanding them.