The first is something a group of classmates in the material science department are trying to start, where we basically dedicate a hour or two each Friday morning to discuss any paper we thought was particular interesting, or maybe just a general science event of the week.
Perhaps the one most notable news of this week, is the report of a 1.5 micron giant sized virus released from an melting ice cap, that was still found to be ACTIVE (note I chose not to use the word alive). Global warming or not, this does stress why we should be sensitive to things such as climate change rather than just saying, "Oh this winter is much colder than the previous one." In this case, while the giant virus doesn't infect humans, it's size scale is something that we as a scientific community have not approached before, and hence the delicacy and requirement to further investigate it.
Overall we talked about a plethora of stuff, and I had a lot of fun with my other four classmates. While no time is set yet for each week, just comment and let me know if you (imaginary readers) are ever interested in joining.
The second was the Graduate Symposium.
Now in it's seventh year, it went extremely well. I wonder if I am more biased simply because I presented as well, and therefore had an overall good impression of it being a participant as well, or that all the student posters and speakers were excellent. The graduate symposium acts to provides all of us a chance to learn about one each other's research, but I noticed one more additional detail which isn't advertised. That is the interaction between students and professors (who are not their advisors). Having several professors stop by and talk about my poster, and be genuinely interested and understand what is going on, revealed to me the breadth of knowledge they have. It does make me wonder how long or how much one has to read before they can engage students to critically think like so, rather than just being receptive to what the poster is presenting.
I think discussing papers on a weekly basis is a great thing to do. We do it most the time in the number theory group at Northwestern, and it has been very useful. We mostly use it to survey the most famous papers in our field, so I'm not sure what it would look like in Material Science.
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