 to science, academy, information, welcome session. I'm really pleased to see so many people here. So thank you very much for taking the time to spend a portion of the group in the girls tonight. My name's Nicola. I work in the Faculty of Sciences here at the University of Abilade and I'll be presenting tonight alongside my colleague Professor Amanda Abel, Deputy Dean of Teaching and Learning here in the Faculty of Sciences. As always, we'd like to acknowledge the garden people and the original custodians of the garden like planes and the land on which we live today. So a couple of housekeeping things before we get started. If there is a fire, you will hear a woop woop noise and we will evacuate out of the girls here at the top and meet on the car park which is just the left as you come out of the building. Toilets to the right on the left, outside of the lecture theatre. So we've got a lot of information for you tonight so I'm going to get started. Tonight we're going to be talking about some of the cool things that happen in science right here in South Australia. We're also going to talk about why you should study science why you should study science and why you should study science here at the University of Abilade. We're going to talk about some of the exciting and emerging careers in science and of course we're also going to talk about the science and programming program and what's available to you in year 12. And we've got a lot of time for Q&A at the end so if you leave your questions there that would be great. So now I'd like to hand over to Professor Amanda Rable. Thank you. Thanks Nicola. It's really great to see so many of you here tonight particularly when we consider that you're going to be our bright young minds of the future. So it's really great that you're here. As Nicola said my name's Amanda and I'm a professor in plant science so yes I'm a scientist but I primarily focus on plants and when we think about science in particular I actually think we're really lucky here in South Australia because we've got I guess the best of all worlds because we have lots of mining that happens we have lots of agriculture and viticulture that happens in this state and I'm going to give you some of those examples but being a scientist means that I actually have lots of opportunities open to me because I'm a critical thinker I can solve big problems so that means that science is actually a really valuable type of career that we might have and one of the other reasons why me myself why I became a scientist was because I can solve problems and I can help to meet challenges now I'm a plant scientist so I like to work with agriculture and in particular make sure that we can try to breed plants that defend themselves better against disease so I have a purpose in life I'm trying to help the growers that are out there and there are lots of other challenges and I'm going to touch on some of those challenges that face us here not only in South Australia but across the world as well so we might as well stick with the theme of food for the future and the University of Adelaide has actually got a really strong background in this area we have not only this campus we also have the Roseworthy campus which is about and I'm not sure what direction I'm in here but it's about I'm getting told it's that way which is about 50 kilometres in that direction and then there for that means the weight campus must be in that direction so we've got a couple of campuses which are world renowned for their ability to work in this area of agriculture and food and we work on all sorts of different things so when you think about the population we all know that the world's population is growing and it's growing quite rapidly but here in South Australia we're also facing that challenge of urban sprawl I'm pretty sure if you know you think about um and your parents might know this better than the students in the room perhaps but if you consider what it looked like 20 years ago you know heading up towards the Barossa or down to McLarenvale there was hardly any houses down that way and now everything's actually we're sprawling however luckily by April 2019 there'll be something in place which will help to stop urban sprawl but what it does tell us is that there is a real demand on land and a lot of the land that we want to grow houses on grow houses on build houses on I should say is actually the land that we need to grow food on not all lands terribly good at growing food so we need to find sustainable ways to grow that food and the other challenge that we're facing at the moment is obviously climate change we all know and have seen lots of things on tv who's seen all of the stuff that's happening in New South Wales with the droughts yeah so we've seen lots of stories and what that means is that we have to be able to breed crops that can deal with that type of situation so not only have we got droughts we've also got the swinging changes in climate and temperature as well and we're trying to grow food in this for our population and so that is quite challenging you've also got the livestock for example that's also challenged by this sort of thing and so you have to be able to work out solutions to help deal with that situation because we can't necessarily change the climate but we can change our practices to make sure that we are delivering the food that we need to in a sustainable manner that also comes back to this problem of food waste how much how many I'm going to ask you a couple of questions here how many of you think we waste more than 80 percent of our food in a week nobody oh a couple people yeah okay what about between 30 and 50 percent how about between zero and 30 percent so less than 30 percent most of you are actually kind of in the right ballpark 30 percent of fruit and vegetables in this state actually end up being wasted and that's actually equivalent to about $4,000 per household a year that we're just wasting we're we're quite a wasteful society when it comes to food so can we actually find ways to deal with that food in a better way other than the way in which we deal with it at home as consumers well we can do a whole bunch of things particularly when it comes to food processing so if we have potato waste maybe we could turn that into a new beverage if we have apple waste that's actually currently being worked on at the University of Adelaide with some people to actually turn it into a new product linked to apple cider so there are lots of different ways in which we can think about things so again thinking innovatively thinking about how we can solve a particular problem and as I mentioned before we've got around about 130 years of history here we're very well known in South Australia for working in agriculture food and wine and the Waite campus is actually the biggest I guess concentration of researchers in that area in the southern hemisphere and we're the third largest in the world so we quite like our mantle as the largest in the southern hemisphere and given how important agriculture food and wine are to South Australia it means that we're in the right place to be looking at those things other than agriculture food and wine you all will have probably heard about the fact that we're going to have the space agency here when you think about space it's not just about the stars actually it impacts a lot of industries it impacts defence it impacts agriculture again it impacts a whole range of different things it impacts you every day when you use your mobile phone because communications and solar flares can play up with solar flares can interact with your uh with satellites they can interact with communications and cause damage so we need to be able to understand more about these things and the space agency will allow that to happen so the space agency is going to go over the road here in the old RAH which we call lot 14 now in that innovation precinct and so the fact that this is coming to South Australia is actually a really big opportunity for those of you that might be interested in heading into that type of science it's something that is going to actually be worth around about 12 billion dollars and create up to 20 000 jobs by 2030 is what the government's predicting so that's that's pretty impressive so we have an opportunity here in South Australia to take advantage of that space agency not only is space important but obviously biomedical science and biotechnology who's seen the um we like to call it the spaceship down the other end of North Terrace do you know what i'm talking about the big health medical it kind of looks like a spaceship um well it's a very nice piece of architecture um but within that building what's inside the building is actually much more important because that's our biomedical science and technology precinct and so when you're thinking about biomedical science and biotechnology what we're talking about here really is the ability to deal with all of the diseases that we have to deal with as we get older we have an aging population so that's one thing that we need to think about obviously issues like diabetes are becoming more of an issue also it's not just that but it's also some of the new technologies and developing new technologies that can detect cancer more readily and more easily for example um there are lots and lots of places where biomedical biotechnology and health can take you and there's also going to be new set of buildings that are going to be built uh Samory too is what we call it so the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute is what's currently in the spaceship down the other end um but there's going to be a second one there and it's going to have the first proton therapy unit as well so one of the goals of this is to not just be involved in research but to also help support things like startup companies and so what that means is when you're thinking about innovation you're also thinking about another word called entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship is that ability to take what we learn in a research sense as a scientist and actually apply it in some way to the real world and in a commercial sense as well so that's going to be quite important here in South Australia for us to I guess push forward in that space the other thing that South Australia's got plenty of is lots of sun lots of solar energy is kind of where we're heading in the future but not just that we've also got copper and aluminium which is quite abundant and bauxite as well and so what we've got is we've got a bunch of different companies which have now invested lots of money in South Australia to try to basically I guess well what they do is they bolster our energy and resources sector and here at the University of Adelaide we're involved in some of that through a whole range of different projects so examples of different projects that are happening here in South Australia include a solar energy project in Waiala 1.37 billion dollar investment and that's going to create 350 jobs and hopefully power 96,000 homes so that's actually got a fairly big impact particularly when we know that there's been a lot of talk about the cost of power there's been a lot of talk about actually being able to maintain the energy resources here in South Australia as well and BHP has got some copper discovery and we also know that Al Coa has also got or is working on a project at the moment to convert bauxite to aluminium using solar energy as well so there's a whole bunch of different things that are happening in this space so it all requires mind power to help with those particular things and that's really one of the main reasons why you should study science is because we've got all of these exciting opportunities available in this area we've got energy and resources ag food and wine we've got the medical side of things as well and space lots of stuff happening in South Australia which means we've got lots and lots of opportunities available into the future and when you think about those opportunities it's not just okay great I'm going to be able to solve problem actually close to 80% of jobs in the marketplace actually require you to have some type of problem solving critical thinking ability and what science does is that actually increases that ability for you that is you learn to become what I regard as more employable and most employers when you talk to them within the industry within all industries in South Australia will say okay I need someone who can solve problems someone who can think critically someone who is an active learner you guys are all obviously active learners or you wouldn't be here wanting to engage in the science academy so TIC you've already reached one of the one of the things that employers really want which is great they also want people who can communicate well and interact with others well so that interpersonal skills and you know what as a scientist that's one of the things we all have to do I have to make sure if I want my research to mean something I have to be able to communicate it to the outside world so that aspect is quite important as well but one of the other things if you're not sold on science yet for its problem solving ability is that the top 10 degrees for or sorry let me reword that I'll say that slightly differently in terms of science and having a degree in science you end up in the top 10 in terms of dollars when you graduate okay so there is lots of potential for dollars after you graduate so I guess what I'm really trying to say here is that the world needs scientists to solve its problems that's why we're all very important okay scientists are needed for that but you know it doesn't have to be on a big scale it can be on a big scale and the united nations has got a whole bunch of sustainability goals which you know ultimately we'd like to be able to solve so things around stopping world hunger making sure we've got food security and making sure we've got clean water those types of things are you know the whole world once that sort of thing that's a global problem if you then come down to South Australia those different problems I mentioned in terms of drought and the impact on our local barley crop might be an example and even further than that just in your own backyard maybe there's actually things like how am I going to grow this plant better which you might want to solve that's quite an extreme version of local but we've got local all the way up to global so if you're actually going hmm I want to be a scientist and I want to solve problems then actually what you're going what you're thinking about then is the possibility of being a future scientist and you know we can't predict all of the jobs that are out there 10 years ago we would not have predicted that every most of you guys in the room have probably got a mobile phone now we would not have predicted that 10 years ago there's been a revolution in the communication industry there is likely to be an industry and lots of innovation and revolution in other industries such as big data and artificial intelligence and all of these different words which are all starting to appear in the media but what it means is as a future scientist you are a world problem solver you might become a data scientist you might become a nutritionist an ecologist a forensic scientist merchant banker yes you might even be able to solve problems as it relates to money genetic researchers vets there's a whole range of different things now the reason why I'm flashing this up here is this particular website here ua.edu.au future scientist actually you should visit it because it actually has lots of different examples of the different types of careers of where our graduates have gone and so it's worth well worth the visit but some graduates they're not here in person but they're on the slide here let's see where they've ended up just to give you an idea of the types of things that our graduates do so the first lady there Hannah McCardle I actually know Hannah quite well because she did a bachelor of agricultural sciences and me being a plant scientist I do a lot of teaching into that particular degree but Hannah um when she left university went and worked for um Osvedge which look after vegetables and the marketing of vegetables so she became very interested in marketing but the other side of it was she was out in the field she now works for syngenta in crop protection which means she's definitely out in the field and you can see her comment there is I love working outdoors sitting at a desk every day is not for me but I still wanted to study a science degree so that opportunity to sometimes work outside Luke the next one along is at the Royal Adelaide Hospital as a clinical research scientist and you know took him he decided that he could actually go in any particular direction and he followed different things that he was interested in until he finally settled on something um that he was interested in Sally there my degree opened so many opportunities I was able to work on ice cube for my phd and make a trip to the south pole now I get to continue my work at University of California Berkeley so she's overseas wow that's great now you might be going what is ice cube well ice cube is this three kilometre deep patch of ice um down at the south pole about one kilometre squared and what it is is basically a place where there is a station which they shot these particles out into space they went into a black hole and the black hole spat back out these things called neutrinos neutrinos are subatomic particles they hit that ice and the ice is the cleanest purest ice on the planet and it has to be very clean it has to be very pure pure and in in contacting that it turns them into our muons which are another subatomic particle and basically you end up with this blue you could follow them down through the ice they were a blue streak and so she got to be part of that particular experiment which is pretty exciting to find the first neutrinos and a black hole so it told them what direction the black hole was in at least that's my understanding I'll just point out I'm not a physicist I'm a plant scientist but that's my understanding of it at least and the last person there is actually someone who took that entrepreneurship side of things so he's actually started his own company called Life Whisperer which looks at IVF technology or in vitro fertilisation technology and he's saying it gave him that that mindset to tackle the problems in industry in particular so that's the sum of where our graduates have gone in terms of coming to uni of Adelaide look where in the top 150 in the world 100% of it of our research here is above world standard we've got lots of industry partners on all three campuses and we're also number one for graduate satisfaction and when i'm talking about graduate satisfaction i'm talking about things like not just what they learn but also things like the fact that they get opportunities to do industry placements the fact that our students have global opportunities they can study overseas for part of their degree or they might have access to certain scholarships as well and obviously South Australia is a pretty good place to live and study at the same time so that's it from me in terms of the science i'm going to hand back over to Nicola now who's going to tell you about the science academy thanks Nicola. Thanks very much Amanda. I really hope that you've taken away from what mum said that you know science has got so many opportunities for you and so many different careers and the skills that you're going to learn in a science degree even if you end up in a different industry all together that is still going to be really really valuable and that's really what the science academy is all about. We want to help you take your passion to science and find the career to try for you. So basically the science academy is an outreach programme for students who are in years 8 to 12 who are passionate about science but we know life as a year 12 student can be pretty stress you know it can be pretty stressful for worrying about your assignments to you know the pressure of what you need to go to, what degree you're going to go to, where you're going to go to get here all of those things so we've tailored a special science academy programme for you guys which has got a whole range of on-campus activities and also an early offer into a range of science degrees here at the university of Adelaide. I'm going to talk more about that. So in terms of in the audience now who's actually registered for the science academy? Can we have a share of that? Oh quite a lot of you. Well done. That's great. So basically why you should join or why now you should tell your friends to join is that by joining the science academy you're going to learn you know about all of those opportunities that Amanda's spoken about in more detail. You're also going to get insight into what it's like to be a student here on at the university of Adelaide. You've also like I said benefit into an early offer into a range of science degrees and I'm going to go into that in more depth invites to on-campus events, networking opportunities with graduates and industry professionals meet other like-minded people so we're all here because of our love of science and you're going to get on goings to ports from our staff members so and that's academic and professional staff members on admissions or prerequisites. We know it can be hard to navigate that so through science academy you're going to get that support. A bit more about the events that we've got on offer. So the next event that's coming up is the April school holiday workshop. So this workshop is a bit of a choose your own science adventure. It's run over two days and we've got five different activities and you guys can actually choose which activities are most relevant to you for you so we have got activities in chemistry, biology, drone technology, physics and laser radio workshop and food and nutrition. So that's live on our website now. You can register tonight if you'd like or you can register at home. We can send down the link of course to all that information and that's a really good opportunity to to try you know some different things so you might think like oh I'm really just in chemistry and you come in and give that bit of a try or I actually you know I'm doing physics now but I'm not sure that's fine right for me. Come to you know the workshop and then give it a go. There's seven careers tonight so that's the next one in there and that's a great opportunity to come and hear from industry. So industry talk at that event, some of our graduates talk at that event and so you can have an opportunity to speak with them and see how they got into the career that they're in, what did they do at university, what subjects did they do at school and what's their journey. We've also got a degree preview evening and that's in June and that's a really good event because we're going to talk about all our programmes, we're going to talk about all our prerequisites and pathways. So in June if you're thinking on our love science I'm not quite sure which degree is right for me. Come to that event because you'll learn a bit more about how we can get you into a place here in the University of Allard. We've also got Roseworthy so as Amanda said we're over three different campuses so Roseworthy is where we do animal science, animal behaviour and virus science so there you can go out to the campus, you can have a tour of the facilities, you can talk to the academics, you can talk to some of the students there and it's really an invaluable session for people who are interested in those fields of study. The dates haven't been confirmed yet but we'll keep you up to date with that. In August we have our open day course which I'm sure many of you have attended before and that just showcases everything the university has on offer. In September we have SASTA exam seminars so we have seminars in chemistry, biology, physics and psychology and they're run here on the university campus and they're run by SASTA which is South Australia's Science Teaching Association and as a science academy driver you'll get discounted tickets to come along to those and they're really good. It's not about necessarily the content but it's about tips and tricks before you go into your exam, what kind of skills do you need to be able to take those exams. Then in October we have our engineering event which is our showcase event for our four year engineering students so if anybody is interested in engineering I highly recommend that you come along to that and you get to see the graduate final projects, you get to speak with them, you get to speak with industry representation there as well so it's a really good event to find out exactly what you would be doing if you came and did engineering here. Okay so fit early off a programme which is one of the main benefits for you guys in the programme so that's basically rewarding you for studying science in year 12 right and we know there's more to your engineering exam results and we know that studying science at high school is going to help you if you want to study science at university it makes sense right and basically we can offer you, there are some eligibility requirements which I'll go through but we can offer you an early offer, an early provisional offer into a range of science degrees here at the University of Adelaide before you sit your exams so it's a bit you know it takes a pressure off a little bit when you go into those exams so eligibility needs to be in year 12, you need to gain a C plus or higher in two of your science subjects or one science and one maths, I'll just note that psychology is not included in the science subjects um here if you go but if there is if you are in psychology and you have got a specific degree pathway talk to us you know and we have a lot of different options um achievement in a tier of 65 or higher that's going to be in a tier meet your prerequisites of your chosen degrees so some of our degrees do have prerequisites and you will need to meet those and obviously preference your programming data so you still need to apply to state app through the kind of regular application process most of our degrees are available in this program they're about four that are not available um but we do you know like I said if you are kind of set on doing visit high computational high performance computational physics um you know we can talk to you there are pathways and options available um and basically don't you know if you don't if it comes to the end of year 12 and you don't get your first preference there's always an option um and as part of science category what we want to do is want to reduce that stress so talk to us early on um and we can see uh you know um how we can get you into a degree here okay dates to be aware of mark so if you've not already already registered highly recommend that you register for the program um early so that you get an opportunity to be part of all of the events that are happening um as well as ongoing communication throughout the year um as a set event in august um if you are eligible so if you do the two science subjects are one science and one maths you'll receive the early offer in the post um august satire opens um and you lodge your satire application um in august and september and then uh in december uh last year all the units did an early offer out so that happened late december um you'll get your results and then that comes out up two days later i think and all the universities will be doing that um again should be doing that again this year um and then the main university of offer out so if you don't get one in december there are panic there's plenty more offer out that that happened um and like i said you know um there's so many different options if you don't get your first preference there's a whole range of different things that um you can do uh to get into the degree that you want to do to might be a slightly different pathway than you're expecting or slightly longer but i'm sure we ought to get there next steps um so you need to register to be eligible for the offer um and highly recommend that you um check out the school holiday workshop because places for that will be limited some of the numbers are um some of the places are different for the different workshops um we've got more information on our website so santa coming um link there and the future sciences link as amanda spoke about before that's really it from me um i'm over to you really for any audience questions that you might have questions questions over there degrees related to radiology i might have to hand over to my colleague Ari who's making his way down the stairs right now in terms of radiology there are a couple options so for us it's mostly focused on preparing you and then do we go on and do a post-racial qualification in that field ever so fast we want to do a science qualification generally around physics areas um potentially get a biology in there too but there's no dedicated specific degree to radiology with us we would use us as a pathway to get into that later on somewhere else any other questions so um basically it's assessed on a case by case basis in that scenario um usually have to meet the ATAR to get into that actual program um but torch was when you get your exam results because there could be a different option into that so it might be that um you actually start in a bachelor of science um if you wanted to say for example you want to get into biotech or biomed you might actually start in a bachelor of science first and then transfer there later the biggest thing is to have the right prereqs that's probably what we're most um kind of interested in yeah a question no space science yes I think you can I think you might be able to I might have to to I'll find out for you and I'll after the science after the session here I'll find out for you it's a good question you can certainly do electives in that area yes yeah you can do electives but whether you can major I don't know we'll we'll find that out yeah questions about that can apply to all the ships as well any more questions okay well all our team will be outside in the foyer and available to answer any questions that you might have I want to really thank you all for spending your time with us tonight