Work experience

Science Communication Officer

Placement type
Students will undertake specific projects during the week as well as generally assisting the Physics Access Officer in their duties.
Brief description of the project or placement
Students will have the opportunity to:

• Design an activity, short talk or worksheet about science for children
• Design a poster or flyer to promote a science event
• Assist at a science event for the public or school children
• Assist with office administration

Placement length
1 week
Available dates
18th - 22nd June 2012.

Electronics Workshop Buddy

Placement type
Hands on electronics workshop skills
Brief description of the project or placement
You will be given a circuit to assemble. Once assembled you will use workshop test equipment to test it.
Placement length
1 week
Available dates
2nd - 6th July 2012
Other dates in July available on request.

Assistant to a Physics Research Technician

Placement type
Work alongside a Physics Research Technician
Brief description of the project or placement
To work with a technician involved in construction and testing of electronic equipment for Physics wide research. This will involve learning the use of hand and machine tools, the construction techniques in wiring, soldering and use of test equipment.
Equipment to be used:

1. Computer terminals
2. Optical measurement equipment
3. Electronic test instruments
4. Electronic technician hand tools
5. Cryogenics
6. Soldering iron
7. General bench test instrumentation
8. Low power batteries (PP3)
9. Low voltage power supplies <30V

Placement length
1 week
Available dates
July

Can we see the stars tonight?

Placement type
Research
Brief description of the project or placement
Despite anecdotal evidence that “it’s always cloudy in the UK”, conditions for observing in the UK are not quite as bad as it first seems. For the past 6-12 months, we’ve been using a series of sensors to measure the night-time sky conditions in Oxford. The goal of this project is to analyse the data from these sensors, check that they are consistent with each other, and make a measurement of what fraction of the time we can actually see the stars at night. This will contribute to future plans to upgrade the telescope in Oxford to make use of all the clear time possible, rather than just those (limited) evenings when people are available to run the telescope manually.

The project will involve looking through videos/images from our “all sky camera” (see here for the live image; http://www-astro.physics.ox.ac.uk/~fclarke/ASC/) to give a visual estimate of how clear it was on each night, and then correlating that with automated measurements from the camera and another monitoring tool to check their validity.

You will need to analyse data, make plots and write a basic report. The work is achievable in Microsoft office tools such as Excel.
Placement length
1 week
Available dates
16th - 20th July 2012
23rd - 27th July 2012