Over the last two days perhaps 250 or more prospective students and their parents visited the Department, saw our labs, and heard talks from either Jim and Paul, or Paul and I. It was busy, as was campus, I think there almost 4,000 on campus on Saturday. It took a lot of effort to organise. The days were hard work, on Saturday I was glad of the (very good) giant brownie one of the students working on the day had baked and brought in. My thank-you email went to 22 people.

I think all 23 of us did our best and the prospective students and their parents seemed happy. But it is a little hard to tell. Hopefully they left knowing more about physics degrees and so better able to make what is an important choice, and with a good impression of Surrey.

I am not sure that any of the many prospective students or parents I talked to explicitly raised the issue of 9k fees, but I talked to a lot so I could have missed one. What a lot of parents asked about is what jobs our graduates go on to do. I think a lot of them are understandably worried about their son or daughter running up a large debt and then not getting a job to pay it off.

To be fair on the new fee structure, the graduate debt is only repayable when a graduate is earning more than £21,000 a year, but then of course if you earn less the debt just stays there. Fortunately the job prospects of graduates with a good physics degree are excellent, and this is what we said, with examples of where our graduates have gone on to work. Places from BAe to Astrium (a satellite maker) to the BBC. I hope this was reassuring.

One of the best bits of open days is the sheer enthusiasm many of the 17-year olds have for physics. They’re the future and so it looks like the future is bright. With the aid of a good physics they can go far.

I do worry a bit about some other subjects, I am sure that there are kids just as enthusiastic about history as the kids I saw today were about physics. As I said a number of times to prospective students undecided whether they should do physics or engineering, physics or maths, etc, you should do the degree you think’ll you enjoy the most. The degree whose lectures will be easiest to get out of bed for. But doing a history degree is as expensive as doing a physics and the job prospects are not as good. This may make choosing difficult.