[staff-physics-and-astronomy-HL-UHD-UD] VERY URGENT!!! First-year projects: include your project from last year?

[Beta NAT Secretariaat]

Dear all,

Due to a technical issue, the message below was never received by our senior staff.
Secretariat Physics and Astronomy
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Dear Amsterdam-based Physicist or Astronomer,

 tl;dr: Please submit your proposals for 1st year projects in June at the following link:
https://uva.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0dlEPOf8wkgaq2y

Deadline: March 9th eob  March 13 eob

Thanks!
Joshua, Clara

More information
The UvA/VU Physics and Astronomy BSc program wants to make your experimental research activities more visible in its program. You can help out! Help is much appreciated because we need to cater to 100+ students. Please make time and capacity available in your research lab to supervise groups of students (3-5 students per group) in the month of June.

We use a survey form to collect your project data, among which:

  *   Your name/email
  *   Optional: intended (PhD/PD) supervisor name/email
  *   Project Title
  *   Project Description
  *   # students per team
  *   # teams that you could host
  *   Optional: upload a scientific (non-review) article that students use to prepare. We will need one later if you don’t provide it now.
  *   An indication of when the students should be in the lab (e.g. due to your absence for traveling etc).

Please keep in mind: The first-year students like freedom but also need more structure than you may realize. For the project, include:
(1) Expected working hours/days (usually 10-17h, total 80 hours lab time from June 2-20, work from home possible, etc)
(2) Project goal. Can be: explore open ended question, calibrate sample/machine, extract feature from data, etc. (more details below)
(3) Supervision strategy: introductory meeting, periodic meetings, group meeting attendance, etc.

 Project submission form: https://uva.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0dlEPOf8wkgaq2y
We use the same form as for Research Project. The deadline for submission is March 9 eob

Even more background and practical information:

The students need to work about two weeks fulltime in the lab total, to be distributed over the first three weeks of June. They will spend the remaining time on training on how to perform teamwork, Github use, poster presentation and video communication. Training on teamwork will be provided by others. It is NOT needed to keep the entire team busy with lab work - they need to also read literature, make a poster, animation, do data analysis: dividing labor is a skill they need to learn as well.
In our course, which will run in the month of June ‘24, we aim to train students in (1) the scientific skill of “ownership” (2) team work (3) scientific group attitude (4) poster presentation and (5) animation. Example animations from last year:  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI0ymz1NAeSZ90UjZz_7EjM43v4whHfaD

There is considerable flexibility as to what the students should do. Students can:

  *   Get confronted with a simple experiment and let them describe/rationalize observations.
  *   Repeat experiment from a PhD student/postdoc at slightly different settings
  *   Perform data analysis on a (new) data set with (new) code and perform some systematic study
  *   Build a necessary component in a slightly different way
  *   Prepare a sample in a different way (if sample prep is reasonably involved)
  *   NEW: we also allow projects with more emphasis on data analysis. The students could do mostly coding/numerical work, but there should be a substantial lab experience included.

In all these tasks, the idea is to spark creativity, curiosity, ownership. The project is best designed to have a fixed 1-3 day experimental part in the beginning to get going with the activity with something that you know will work. After this initial phase, the students are requested to come up with a research question by themselves, guided by the supervisor. For examples of projects, please see here:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5bltupdeidn2t84fjqfgl/Project_description_examples_appendices.pdf?rlkey=obegmktxgg9zpexk5jktpsrgp&dl=0

The project phases will consist of the students

  *   Studying research literature (in April/May, before starting the project),
  *   Performing some (basic) experiment hosted by a research group in early June
  *   Presenting the research work in a poster and short video in the last week of June (please save the Thursday if you would like to attend the poster session).

If this sounds familiar: another approach to expose students to research is via the second year BSc “Research Practicum”, in which students get to interact for one week with a scientist and work on a suitable project. Our course comes before the “Research Practicum” and you are encouraged to participate in both (with the same topic), as the learning goals for both courses differ substantially, and the same students will not be assigned to the same project.

Note: we have probed the students' interests in research topics with a new updated version of a booklet with very brief topic descriptions. We have grouped the research activities per topic and will so be able to use these preferences to build the teams. Please find the 2026 booklet here:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/o26cgp3y7gxydpup2vzoz/First-Year-Booklet-2026.pdf?rlkey=y4wfhspgstf2ieugy1ilrwqe5&dl=0

Send us your feedback on Booklet if you have any. We will make sure that your project gets assigned to students who have indicated interest in the topic of your project.

Any further questions can be sent to:

j.a.dijksman at uva.nl<mailto:j.a.dijksman at uva.nl>

c.nellist at uva.nl<mailto:c.nellist at uva.nl>



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