Physics Spring 19 Newsletter

The Society of Physics Students has been busy this year. This years officers are Mickie Eik- enberry (President), Zack Alegria (Vice President), Addy Evans (Secretary), Wyatt McCoy (Treasurer). We have had many events such as our annual department picnic or the spooky lab night for Halloween. Our chapter is working hard to come up with new and creative ways to get students of all ages inter- ested in physics. During one of our earlier meetings members were challenged to build stable and/or tall structures with the provided materials- spaghetti noodles and mini marshmal- lows. Not only was this a lot of fun, but we also got to discuss how and why some structures worked better than others and how our designs compared to real world building designs. We will definitely make this activity one we revisit in the future and hopefully throughout the years it will be an event the members anticipate and their results will keep improving. Our bi-annual SPS picnics went off with out a hitch! Spring- time by the pool is especially nice. Another one of the more recent events we’ve began doing is putting up a table at the Will Rogers Elementary STEM fair. Groups from all over Oklahoma State will go to demonstrate what’s fun and interesting to the students. It’s always a blast and especially rewarding to think about how we’ve been able to spark a curiosity in the field that we love so much. For the very first time our group hosted a “spooky lab night”. The week of Halloween we decorated one of research labs and put up fun spooky themed science demonstrations. Children ages 5-10 were invited to participate in things such as making slime, shooting creepy crawly plastic creatures, mess- ing with a Van de Graaff gener- ator, and shooting ghosts with air guns. Of course we had can- dy available after each activity as well. In the end we had 50 kids and parents show up and we hope to pull in even more people next year. This will no doubt become an SPS tradition here at Oklahoma State. Spring 2019 │ 7 OSU Physics Newsletter SOCIETY OF PHYSICS STUDENTS STUDENT AWARDS AND INTERVIEWS Pokes PodCAS Dipendra Bhandari wins First Place award in ASC’s 64th Annual Pentasectional for his presen- tation of Molec- ular Dynamics Study of Protein Mortalin and Anti-Cancer Com- pounds Flex-Hets authored by Dipendra Bhandari, Maryam Mashayekhi, Gil Repa and Donghua Zhou. Episode 3: An interview with Kylie Hagerdon, chemistry and physics pre-med student Kylie Hagerdon is a physics and chemistry pre-med student who was just accepted to University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center along with a large schol- arship. In this interview with Lonna Freshley, Kylie talks about the challenges and re- wards of being a pre-med stu- dent, the rigors of the medical school application process and her future plans. https://cas.okstate.edu/pokespodcas This newsletter brought to you by the Office of the Department of Physics.