 We're going to spend the next 20 minutes or so just talking to you guys about School of Physical Sciences. I'm Andrew McKinnon. I'm an actual physicist, so don't hold that against me unless you love physics and then you'll embrace the whole idea. Good thing is I won't be talking for the full 20 minutes. I've got three students from the School of Physical Sciences who are at various stages of their journey here at University of Adelaide who will be talking to you about their experiences. And that's part of what we're going to talk to. I'll talk a little bit about the more boring things and then they're going to come in and hopefully inspire you all of why physics, chemistry or earth sciences are a really good pathway to choose. A few things there. University, why University of Adelaide? Well, we're the leading university. We're ranked in the top 1% worldwide. I'm going to talk a little bit more about some of those details and these guys will as well. So physical sciences, that incorporates physics, chemistry and earth sciences which is a geology, geophysics type of area. As I said, we're going to hear for three students. They all have very unique journeys and I think that's the important thing. Your education is actually a journey. And one thing is it's a journey that should be challenging, should be rewarding and also it's a journey that has to lead somewhere. And that's one of the really powerful things about science is it does lead somewhere, it does open doorways. Now when you sort of consider what is in physical sciences, there's a lot of different variants and sometimes people can get confused about this or the different degrees, the name degrees. I'm not going to go into the huge detail behind these. We've got set up in the tent next door. We've got people there who will be able to spend some time sitting down explaining some of the nuances. The main thing I just want to point out is the things the Bachelor of Science or the Bachelor of Science advance, when you do those you end up doing a major. So the main thing we're going to be talking about is the people who lead on and end up with a major in chemistry or geology, geophysics or theoretical physics or experimental physics. Then we've got the advanced degree. You also end up with a major. The only difference is the advanced degree has a research component attached to it. They are very similar programs but it just has that research component in the first to second and the third year. So you actually can spend time with some of the researchers potentially doing some research yourself which is a great opportunity. Then we have the name degrees. The ones I have up there are the energy geoscience, the mineral geoscience. They're from the geology area. So they end up, they're very similar to a normal Bachelor of Science with a major, for instance, in geology or geophysics. But some of the courses which they encourage you to do and you need to do lead into that slightly more focused area. Then we have the physics ones, space science and astrophysics, high performance, computational physics which is actually an honours degree. It's a three year and honours is already embedded in it. Normal degrees you'll do a three year degree and then honours after and laser physics and technology. Again, they're very similar to a Bachelor of Science with a major in physics but the courses or the subjects, what you guys would call subjects we call courses have got a focus in those areas but they still end up being effectively a Bachelor of Science with a major in one of the discipline areas. Why study physical sciences? A lot of reasons. You love it. Okay, you like asking questions and finding out solutions. I mean that's one reason why I really love doing science. Studying something new, this is a great opportunity to try something new and a Bachelor of Science, especially in the physical sciences you've got a broad range of things you could actually pick. You want to be a scientist or not and I talk a little bit more about that because it's the skills you get doing science and in the physical sciences can transfer in so many different areas. You want a job. Okay, everyone wants a job, hopefully. If not, this is probably not the pathway for you. If you're not exactly sure what you want to do and this is a really common one, you're not sure what you want to do and you'll find there's a lot of people who get quite far into their degree and aren't yet sure what they want to do but where these degrees are fantastic they let you delay that decision. So if you're still procrastinating or you may know what you want to do, basically this is a great opportunity. Now, some of you may have gone to the talk that Sandy gave this morning which was about the broad science degrees. I'm not going to talk too much about this but the main thing I want to pick up, this was actually, it was a survey which was done in 2015. It was the office of the chief scientist. Top three things, active learning. This is what basically skills that employees want. Active learning, critical thinking, complex problem solving, creative problem solving. That's in a scientific area, not like creative accounting, okay, science, creative problem solving and it's only when you sort of get quite far down you start getting the discipline specific skills. So this is the critical thinking skills, the ability to solve problems. It's the skills you get doing science. That's what employees want. They do sometimes want those discipline specific skills which gives you this fantastic opportunity to study something you really enjoy doing and then get the skills that will get you a job. It's a fantastic combination of the two. Job mobility, this is something which is very different to people of my generation or older where nowadays people are turning over jobs. People are changing career paths. You'll actually find what you think you want to do or what you start out doing. You'll probably find 5, 10, 15 years later you're doing something very different and so that's where at university it's not the skills, it's not the job specific training you get that counts. It's the skills that you actually get, the skills that can be transferred into a lot of different areas. So it is something where it's very unlikely, unlike your parents where they may have had the same job for a very long time, it's very unlikely that people will actually have that in the future and also we don't know what some of the jobs will be in the future. Okay so this is a little, it's a one or two years old this information here so just bear with this for a sec. Physical science graduates, okay what do they earn? Well starting salary for a science graduate in 2015 was about 60,000. That's not too bad. That's not bad. You come up, it's on par with what you get for medicine when you first come out. 47% of people go on to do further full-time study. Now that's because not because they can't get jobs is because they enjoy doing a little bit of extra study. They enjoy the research and the benefit of that is they're starting salaries over 80 grand, okay. By 2019 the level of employment of physical sciences is predicted to grow by 11%. That's actually gone up. That's now up 14%. So there's this demand for people who have got the physical sciences skills to actually get jobs. We realize there's a huge focus on the government in STEM related areas and that's where you get the physical sciences are at the core of those areas. And 22% of physical science graduates are employed before they graduate. We get people who haven't even finished their degree and already have a job lined up which is higher than what it typically is for most university broad graduates. Okay, that's enough of me talking. What I'm now going to do is I'm going to hand the floor over to three of our students. They're in their summer at the beginning, the middle and the end of their PhDs and they're going to talk about their journey. So first off I'd like to ask Jason if you'd like to come up and talk to us about your journey. Step one, figure out the microphone. Is that all right? Hi everyone, my name is Jason Oliver. And today I am speaking to you with a goal in mind, right? And the goal that I have in mind is to share with all of you my experiences over the last five to six years, right? So in keeping with that goal, something I'm not going to be doing is going into huge specifics about what I've studied, right? You'll have loads of people who can do that. I'm going to try and keep it simple and I'm going to try and just be general, right? So with this in mind, I need to talk about where I'm from, where I move to, what I studied and what I plan to do, right? So unlike a lot of people here, I imagine, I'm from a rural town, Waala. You've probably all heard of it. It's well known for its manufacturing of steel and mining and these sorts of related industries. This is a picture from the jetty in Waala, which is probably one of the nicest pictures from the town. The rest is red. That's the secret. And five years ago, I moved from Waala to Adelaide, which, as you can see, is quite different. The reason I moved from Waala to Adelaide is university, right? In year 12, I was a bit unsure what I wanted to study. I knew that I was interested in physics and I knew that science was sort of where I wanted to go. But I think like lots of science students are sort of tempted by the dark side. And in this case, the dark side is engineering, right? And one steel there, when they offer to pay for tuition and things like that, it can be a very tempting sort of offer. But I sort of thought about it. I did my year 12. It's a very difficult time. And then I sort of censored around doing a degree in physics. So the degree I did was a Bachelor of Science Advanced, which is a very research oriented degree. So moving on, I've sort of summarized my undergrad into some highlights. So when I look back on my undergrad, the things that I think about are making lots of friends in like my first and second years. I was founding the Science Society of the University, which is called OSCA. There's like 400 people in it. And going on exchange to Copenhagen, Denmark. And a little bit more about that is when you go on exchange, you go away from six months to a year. To probably like, off the top of my head, I actually don't know how many places that you can go on exchange to. But it's a lot. So if you can think of the country, you can likely get something arranged. And it's that experience in particular that really affected the rest of my degree. It really changes the way that you look at things. And you become a very sort of internationally minded individual. In particular, I really liked my third year of course work. You don't often have people say, yeah, I really like study. But my third year was like really something. The courses that I did were all very well designed. And they all sort of coalesced around specific ideas in physics. And in particular, I also had exposure to research culture, which is sort of summer research scholarships, exposure directly with professors and things like that. And after I think, I think that's really what we want. We want to do a degree, but then also have exposure to what it's sort of really going to be like. Because there can be a disconnect between a degree and the actual job that you're going to do. So because I had academia in mind, this sort of let me sleep well at night. So when I thought research culture, I thought lots of people don't really, when you're just coming into university, that doesn't really mean much. Right? Because it's, it's, you don't have experience surrounding what academics do every day. Right? So I thought a good way to sort of explain what research culture is, is, sorry, yeah, that's better. A good way to explain what research culture is, is by just telling you what I did in my honors. So I chose a project in an area of my choice. For what I did was sort of like a mixture between theoretical physics and experimental physics. I also did coursework. So I did seven courses along the side. And along the way, I learned a lot of different skills, like particularly like programming, which is really transferable. Looking up, being able to read articles and things like that. And at the end, I wrote like a 50 page thesis that I, that was all like mine and what I really understood. And it was titled Chargino Polarization in the MSSM, which is like a really specific thing. And if your eyes glaze over, that's good, because these things are supposed to be specific. Right? You're not supposed to be able to understand at day one. So what I'm doing now is working on the Atlas experiment. So I've started my PhD. How many of you have heard of the Atlas experiment? Just check your hands up. Yeah. Okay. So the Atlas experiment is a cathedral sized detector that's located about 100 meters below Geneva, around the Large Hadron Collider. And for some context, that's a EU citizen, right down at the bottom. So it's a huge detector and it's awesome. And the Large Hadron Collider is this big. So it's 27 kilometers along. Thousands of people work on it. And it's really like cutting edge research. So if you're interested in a PhD, some of the things that are really good about it, it's self-directed. You get direct exposure to research, culture and academics. You can be a part of an international collaboration. And I think the next one's really something I like. There's lots of travel. So in a month's time, I'm actually traveling to Geneva to work for eight weeks. And I'm really excited for that. And you also get coffee machines, which is awesome. And I did have something to say there, but I think I'll probably leave it there. But just say that a lot of the time, you don't know what you want to do. And that's okay. I think if you invest in skills and in yourself, then those skills and that investment in yourself can pay off in many other jobs and things like that. So I'll just leave it at that. Because true to my nature, I spoke too long. That works, I think. Yep. I'm Laura. I've actually just finished my PhD in metamorphic geology here at Adelaide, which is quite a nice feeling because it's always a bit of a long journey to get there. But sometimes I'm really surprised that this is where I've ended up and what I've ended up doing. Because when I was at school, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. My career choices varied almost on a weekly basis from things like architecture to meteorology to diplomacy, which I thought sounded very glamorous. And eventually, by the end of year 12, I still had no idea. So I knew I wanted to go to uni, and I enrolled in a combined law science degree with a diploma of language in Spanish, just to cover as many bases as I possibly could. I didn't even really know what I wanted to do as my science major. And when I got to uni, I started doing geology in first year, and I really enjoyed it and kind of just kept on doing it. Throughout my undergrad degree, I did work experience for a mining company. I did work experience for Santos. I did a law clerkship, and I spent two months living in Spain, learning the language. But somehow throughout all of that, I just kept on doing geology. So I thought I'd share some of the reasons why I started and why I kept on going. Geology is really broad-based, and it gives you an opportunity to study lots of different things. So when I was at school, I liked geography and I liked chemistry. And I get to use both of those things a little bit in my day-to-day work in geology, and also a little bit of physics and a little bit of creativity. So my role is to get what evidence I can and then to try and make the most logical, most simple story I can from the evidence I've got to try and understand specific processes in the earth. I've always been interested in how the world works, and I think lots of people probably fundamentally are, because you look at the earth and you see these patterns that need explanation. So for example, why are some places really safe to live in other places or not? Or why do some places have mineral resources, and why do others not have them? How do we find them? How do we make the most of them? And even just if you're a tourist, looking at the world and saying, why does the landscape look like it does? Why is Mount Everest the highest mountain in the world, or why is there a great big rock in the middle of central Australia? And all of these things are things that geology helps us to answer and to understand. So that's what I really liked about it. It's also a good way of making friends. So when I walked into my first year math class on day one of uni, I knew absolutely nobody. And I was a little bit concerned that I would be a bit lonely. But science in general is a great way to meet people because we have prior sessions, we work in groups and we spend quite a lot of time with contact hours at uni getting to know people. Geology as well as has got quite a strong social scene. So we've got a university geological society who have barbecues. And they also run pub crawls with varying degrees of geology puns on the shirts. So that's always a bit of fun. But because geology's got such a strong field component as well, that was another way of meeting people and getting to know them. And I think lots of students have never done things like field trips before. So at first perhaps it's a little bit out of their comfort zone. But by the end, almost all of them find it a really rewarding experience. And the friends they make on those trips are friends that they keep for a long time. So that was a cool part of geology as an undergrad. I also really like travel, like lots of geologists I think. And so I've got to visit some amazing places that I probably never would have been to otherwise. So even as an undergrad, we visit Central Australia and the Flinders Ranges. And then when we get to honours, there's a trip to New Zealand, which lots of the students really love. But when I started my PhD, that's when I got to visit the really cool interesting places. So I spent two months in Antarctica doing field work, which was obviously a fairly unique experience in one of the highlights of my PhD. I've also visited parts of India that I never would have gone to as a tourist. And last year, I ticked off my seventh continent when I went to a conference in Namibia. So it's kind of good because it's partially paid for, so it's subsidised travel. But it also means that I see the world and I visit places that I wouldn't see as a tourist and I see it differently because I'm there to understand how it works. The recurring theme of my life is pretty much indecision. So the good thing about geology was it left so many doors open and I didn't have to decide right away what it was I wanted to do. So obviously you can work for a mining company or a petroleum company, but really you can also become an exploration geologist and spend time in the field. You can go into teaching, you can work for the government, you can even go into policy and things like that or financial analysis for big finance companies. All of these things, the options that the doors are open to you when you when you do geology. So I really like that and that's sort of why I kept on going. But kind of lost and it sounds a bit lame, the reason I really stuck at it is that geology becomes a lifestyle, it's not just a desk job. So I love being outside, I love travelling, I love going to new places and doing things that are a bit different. And so I get to do that as a job. It's really a kind of unique job I think in that sense. And for me, I've just finished. So what's next for me is that I'm starting a three-year postdoc with the Geological Survey and the University. Next week I'm going out to do helicopter field work in Western Australia. And although I never really expected to end up here, I think what happened was I just took advantage of all the opportunities I had and kept an open mind. And I think that's probably what's really important about your trip at university is just to see where you go and do the best you can while you're doing it. Hello. Hello. How's it going? So my name's Lobby. So I'll just be wrapping up the student talks. So I am a chemist by trade. I'm doing my PhD in chemistry. And I just want to talk a little bit about what I actually do on a database basis and a little bit about what my research is about. So I work in a bit of hydrogels, which is a kind of material that's made about 95% of water. And so if you've been to the emergency room before with like a cut or burn or something, they might put these hydrogels on you to kind of celebrate the healing process. But it's also using things like tissue engineering and drug delivering. I don't really want to focus too much on the chemistry per se, but I do want to kind of mention what this really means as a researcher. So I brought with you one of the hydrogels that I made today. So I've got this orange gel in a vial here. And what this represents is actually one of the rarest and most unique compounds in the world. And I know that because I made this one. This is the only one in existence in the entire universe as far as anyone in this known earth actually realizes. And that's kind of the essence of what a PhD is. It's discovering new knowledge, it's uncovering new facts, and kind of seeing the world before anyone else does. If I sort of thought to myself you know ten years ago when I was sitting in a position similar to yours, I probably didn't think to myself that I would be doing this kind of research, kind of looking at things that no one else had known before. And so 2006, that's when I was in year 12, I got my 10-year school reunion coming up which is quite scary. Like many people in year 12, 17, 18 year olds, I had a bit of a teenage crisis. I didn't really know what I wanted to do in life and I kind of felt like this frog here just kind of hanging on the ledge not knowing where I wanted to go. Yes I liked chemistry and science, but I like maths, I like drama, I like singing and I like painting and all sorts of stuff. And I was kind of confused as to what I wanted to do. There was so much pressure when I was in high school to kind of pick a direction. And I felt that everyone around me knew what they wanted to do and I was the only one that was sort of struggling. I wish someone had told me that this was the reality of the situation, that nobody knows what they're doing. We're all scrambling to kind of figure out what degree we want to do, do we even want to go to uni, do we want to take a gap year or whatever. And yeah that was a difficult time as I'm sure many of you can recognise. So after year 12 I decided that you know going to uni wasn't really a good idea for me. I was too confused and I just need a bit of break after studying for 12 years. So I took a gap year. I deferred university, I worked for the first half of the year and then I saved all my money and went to USA working in one of their summer camps. It was a great synergy for me. From an all-knowing experience to meet all these people, from all these different countries around the world, from the Netherlands, from America obviously, from different parts of Asia, Asia from the Middle East and kind of opened my eyes up into what the world is and also the kind of person that I wanted to be when I you know left and kind of went on with my life. Not necessarily the job I wanted to do but what I wanted to contribute to the world and I think after that gap year I was in a better position to make decisions about my life and so I involved back into uni and I involved in a double degree in both maths and chemistry and I enjoyed both those things and kind of just wanted to see how it went. However, after the first year I decided to drop maths. This was me kind of in a nutshell. In primary school what's one plus one? Two. Awesome. I am amazing at maths. In high school you know it's still a little bit difficult. They started introducing algebra and things like that. Still a challenge but it was something that I felt that like yeah I really enjoyed that. That was really fun but then when I got to university things just spiraled out of control. There were all these like symbols and numbers and I didn't know what they meant and for me it was just too hard and that's when I decided to drop it and quit maths and I think for me that was a really good decision. A lot of the time we think about don't be a quitter just stick with it but for me I could have gone on with maths tried really really hard but in the day I just didn't have it and so I decided to focus my attention to chemistry. A subject I still really enjoyed but I was ultimately better and would kind of like find more satisfaction from that and that decision paid off for me because in the next year I went on a semester exchange to Hong Kong. I think you're kind of seeing like a general travel theme that our students really like to not be here and that's a good thing you know there's very few times where you get the opportunity to spend six months living in another country experiencing another culture meeting people from all around the world and seeing phenomenal views like that and I look back at my time in Hong Kong as some of the greatest times that I ever had. After my third year I decided that I really still did enjoy chemistry and so I went on and involved myself in honours. So honours is a time to do a little bit of research and also to try and figure out is research for me do I like this research life and there was a lot of emotions that were going through my head throughout the year and if you are doing any research you'll probably feel the same thing. There's disbelief when things never work out there's anger when your experiments don't work a lot of depression when you put so much energy into research and it's going to work out a lot of frustration but there's also joy and happiness when suddenly you figure out something a problem that you've been working on for six months and you suddenly crack it. I decided that yes research was pretty good so I decided to involve in my PhD and I sort of wish that when people told me to do a PhD that they kind of explained the whole commitment idea of it and for me a PhD is very much like a marriage it's a commitment to one other person for x amount of time often very strenuous relationship at times but yeah it is a commitment so for those of you that might be thinking about this in the future just bear that in mind but it does lead to a lot of opportunities as well and so in two years ago I got to go to a conference in Germany again traveling seeing the world learning all about other people that brings me to today and the future and what I want to perhaps do in the future and for me I absolutely have no idea what I'm doing and I am not stressed about that idea I think it's okay because if you see my track record it's quite a non-linear pathway that I've taken but it's all sort of worked out in the end and I have kind of faith that with all the things that I've learned throughout my university degree the fact that I have these degrees and have these opportunities but in the future something will come up for me that will work with what I want to do and that's what I want to end with thank you very much okay we've pretty well almost ran out of time so we just ended just in time what now well what now is a big question for you but in the immediate future we're actually going to be running three tours leaving right now so the people leaving the tours Jason will be leading a physics tour and will be leaving from the bottom and heading out those doors chemistry Nobby will be leading a chemistry tour and these are tours that will go outside of what you can normally see and have a look at some of the facilities focusing on physics chemistry and also earth sciences Alan who will be holding a sign there's Alan there actually if you guys lead from the top so chemistry geology leave from the top the last thing I'll leave you guys with is it's a quote that Jane Lomax Smith said when she was given a graduation speech pick a passion not a profession it's the skills that will give you a job thank you very much