Meeting, Fundraising, Social and Activity Ideas for Chapters

Meetings

• Offer Free Food!
  Draws new students in every time! Use your OSA activity grant requests for a Welcome Pizza Party!
  
  
• Bring A Friend Challenge
  Every current member brings at least one friend to the meeting!
  
  
• Initiation Meeting/New Student Welcome Event
  Welcome new optics students on campus. You can share the ins and outs of your department…tell them which professors to take and whom to stay away from!

Fundraising

• T-shirts, Bags or other Items with Logos
  Get recognized! Advertise your chapter with the OSA logo and your school logo…it is also a great way to fundraise.
  
  
• Fundraising
  Tap into your resources! Use OSA activity grant requests, alumni, your outstanding professors, corporate sponsors and especially the campus funding that is available!

Social

• Socialize
  Take a break & get to know your fellow students with fun social meetings, such as Karaoke or Broomball!
  
  
• The Arctic Barbeque, from Simon Hettrick, Univ. of Southampton
  This event is their most successful recruitment activity. Held during the first fortnight after the new students arrive, it gives new students their first chance to meet with the chapter committee and with their new work colleagues. By holding this event, the chapter members portray the society as friendly & fun. It also improves relations between society members and the new students, which improves perception of the chapter & their general sense of well-being at work. Would you like to learn more about social activity ideas from the Univ. of Southampton? Visit http://holly.orc.soton.ac.uk/OSA/.

Activities

• Mentoring
  Match older students with younger students - a great way to provide guidance!
  
  
• Outstanding Professor Award
  Recognize a great professor annually with an award that shows just how much you appreciate him or her!

Educational Outreach Activity Ideas from OSA Chapters

Visit the OSA Student Chapter Education Outreach Library for interactive discussion and project sharing.

• Student of the Year Award, From Sergey Polyakov, Univ. of Central Florida CREOL
  Students of CREOL, the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers, came up with the initiative of creating the Student of the Year Award. A unique aspect of this competition is it is an integration of all professional and educational activities: the successful candidate must demonstrate not only his/her best academic performance and outstanding scientific results, but also great involvement with the professional organizations (like OSA) and active participation in student governance. Most importantly, the competition should allow every graduate student, regardless of his or her year of study, to compete. They created the objective criteria and worked together with faculty to refine the process.
  
  
• Lunchtime Speaker Series, From Krishnan Parameswaran, Stanford Univ.
  Stanford has faculty doing optics-related research in a variety of departments, from applied physics and electrical engineering to biology and chemistry. One way to encourage interaction among these widespread groups is to have a regular seminar series. Over the past 10 years, OSA Stanford has sponsored a weekly lunchtime talk, where students and post-docs present their work in a relaxed atmosphere. People are encouraged to bring lunch, and OSA Stanford provides soft drinks. This has been a very successful activity, drawing around 15 people for each talk. Many interesting discussions take place during and after the presentations and some collaborative research has been initiated by exposing people to projects about which they were previously unaware. These presentations are often used as practice talks by students planning to attend conferences or preparing for a thesis defense. The regular meeting also provides a forum for discussing other chapter activities, as it fits well with the busy schedule of students (most everyone takes time to eat lunch anyway).
  
  
• Secondary Teachers Seminar, from Nicci Lee Dehuff, Oregon State Univ.
  The community schools have requested that students from the Physics Department give seminars to demonstrate optics labs for teachers to perform in their classrooms. With continued support for the optics program from the local community, more students will attend OSU with an interest in optics. After the students conduct the seminars, the teachers receive small packets of gratings, laser diodes, polarizers and several other items to aid them in demonstrating basic concepts to their students.
  
  
• Trip to an Optics Company, from Elaine Lalanne, NJIT
  The leaders at the NJIT Student Chapter organized a trip to Optics for Research (OFR). OFR President Donald Wilson gave the chapters a tour of the company's facilities (manufacturing, research labs, sales dept., etc.). A total of 15 students and 2 faculty members attended the tour. This was helpful in allowing the chapter to see what actually goes on at a company. Most companies you contact recognize that you could be a future recruit and will be more than happy to impress your chapter with a tour, speaker, etc.
  
  
• Collaborating with Local Sections, From Vicki Eller, Univ. of Missouri-Rolla
  Although this chapter has not yet been established, they plan to work with the St. Louis Local Section to make sure their meetings coincide. This way, they are able to leverage the resources of the local section. They would also like to give student chapter members a chance to present their work to the Local Section as practice. This is a great idea for any chapter!

• Outreach Open House, From Jay Sharping & Sarah Dugan, Northwestern Univ.
  The NU Student Chapter invites students, faculty and staff to view the outreach demonstrations that are normally taken out to schools. It is a great, unstructured activity where everybody can mingle and it quickly provokes conversation among the attendees around the demonstrations. Offering snacks generally brings people into the room. Be sure that chapter membership information is available and that a few extra copies of OSA Newsletters, OPN and Physics Today are around to browse through. This is an excellent activity to do in conjunction with a department or campus-wide event such as "parent's day" or "new student week." The activity has several positive outcomes: 1) new members, 2) existing members willing to participate in outreach, 3) looks good for the university and department.
  
  
• NU-OSA Outreach Demonstrations, from Jay Sharping & Sarah Dugan, Northwestern Univ.
  The chapter has developed six different stations that can be presented depending on the motivation of the audience and the number of chapter volunteers available for a given outing:
  
  
• Station 1: "Analog and Digital Optical Communications"
  This free space optical link demonstrates the basics of optical communications. They directly modulate an LED with the signal from a CD player. The signal is sent via the optical beam to a detector that receives the signal. The signal is then sent to a set of amplified speakers so music can be heard. Students can block the beam or misalign the optics and observe the effect on the system. In addition to the audible signal, the electrical signal is displayed on an oscilloscope so the students can observe its analog nature. Using a normal TV remote control, the digital signal is detected so that it can be heard in a set of headphones and observed on an oscilloscope. With this combination of demonstrations, students can learn how the devices around them work and begin to understand the difference between analog and digital signals.
  
  
• Station 2: "Optics in the Fish Tank and Jell-O Optics"
  A fish tank, flashlights and laser pointers are used to demonstrate refraction, reflection and total internal reflection (TIR) at the surfaces of water in the fish tank. A hole was drilled in one end of the fish tank so the student can see how the water spilling out of the hole guides the laser light. To further investigate how TIR is used, they make thick, clear gelatin and cut it into various shapes to show the principles of waveguiding and fiber optics.
  
  
• Station 3: "Lenses, Imaging and Theta-Modulation"
  Using a white light source, transparent objects and various lenses, the chapter can demonstrate the basics of imaging using lens systems. Students get a hands-on basic understanding of image transformation by thin lenses. NU OSA has also acquired a special diffraction grating that allows them to perform a colorful demonstration of diffraction and the information processing capabilities of a "four-f" optical system.
  
  
• Station 4: "The Optics Discovery Kit"
  The Chapter has found that students that are not excited by guided demonstrations often respond nicely to unstructured "discovery" time. They have purchased classroom Optics Discovery Kits and allow students to experiment with the pieces of that kit in a lightly supervised setting. The kit includes holograms, lenses, diffraction gratings and color filters. They also have a Moire kit which many students find stimulating.
  
  
• Station 5: "Liquid Crystal Mood Patch"
  The chapter adopted the liquid crystal mood patch hands-on activity that was developed by the Rochester Local Section. The students make a temperature sensitive cholesterol-based liquid crystal. The students use this to make the mood patch and "discover" its thermal properties. This experiment really gets the students thinking about color, crystal formation and what effect temperature has on materials.
  
  
• Station 6: "Optical Scanner"
  This new, hands-on demonstration is designed to teach students how a bar code scanner device works. Students show a high level of curiosity about this device because it has become so pervasive in society. Each student constructs a scanner that is comprised of an LE, photodiode detector and a few wires all housed in the tube of a ballpoint pen. They can then scan a bar code and try to interpret the trace on an oscilloscope.

Educational Outreach Tips

• Phone local schools and teachers to make contacts. If there is an OSA Local Section in your area, contact them. You may be able to collaborate on your outreach or the Section may already have contacts within the local schools. Another option is to do outreach presentations to girl scout and cub scout troops.
  
  
• Promote your outreach in local educational newsletters.
  
  
• Set a time and a day with the teacher, then choose demos based on age of the students and the time-frame allotted. Develop a dialogue that can convey the information and is appropriate for the age group you are presenting to.
  
  
• Develop simple, yet interesting demos, which can be easily transported/carried to and assembled in a classroom.
  
  
• Your chapter may purchase some demo/outreach kit items. Also, ask your optics professors to donate some of the equipment.
  
  
• Collect feedback from the teachers, so that you can keep improving your activity.