October 1, 2018, by Prof Meghan Gray

Calling all volunteers: the Inflativerse needs you!

We are rather enthusiastic about public engagement at all levels in this department, be it by YouTube, down the pub, or in the classroom. Some of our key outreach activities are planned, delivered, and managed by our very talented undergraduate and postgraduate students. In this guest post, Tom Peterken (currently a PhD student and a Nottingham MSci Physics with Astronomy graduate) is looking for enthusiastic student volunteers to bring the excitement of space to the wider community.

The Inflativerse is the School of Physics and Astronomy’s inflatable planetarium. On 8 Wednesdays throughout the year, we take it to different primary schools in the Nottingham area to share our love for the night sky. We also host a number of extra evening events within the department throughout the year. Our aim is to generate an interest in science among pupils from under-privileged backgrounds.

We’ve just updated our records for all of our events last academic year and we realised we reached more than 650 children in the Nottingham area! We’re aiming to keep working hard this year too. We’ve already got lots of events in the diary, and we’ve just finished checking that all of the equipment is working ready for the term.

However, we’re still missing the most crucial ingredient; you! All of our visits and in-house events rely on a dedicated team of awesome volunteers, most (but not all!) of whom are undergraduate physics students. We’re currently recruiting new team members for this academic year. You don’t need to know anything about astronomy, because we’ll make sure you get trained up as a team member before we send you off to schools! So if you’ve got a passion for spacey things, and you fancy making a truly rewarding impact on our local community without having to dedicate an enormous amount of your time, send us a message at planetarium@nottingham.ac.uk before 10 October and let us know in just a couple of sentences why you’re interested in joining the team, or just to ask for more details about what the job involves.

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