Each year Exciton Science offers work experience placement positions, for undergraduate students in their second or third year, in the Centre labs over the summer break. This also coincides with many of the Centre’s node university’s undergraduate capstone research subjects. Each of these programs gives these students an opportunity to work in our labs and get a taste of what pursuing a postgraduate degree and academic career would look like. In 2020, the Centre decided to bring all of the undergraduate students from our Melbourne nodes together for a Capstone Conference that was held on 26 February at The University of Melbourne.

Each of the students who had been working in labs across the different research groups were invited, and accepted, the opportunity to give a short 10-minute presentation of the work they had done under the supervision of Exciton Science researchers. The students also had the opportunity to hear from two of our Exciton Science postdocs, Laszlo Fraser and Siobhan Bradley, who ran career advice seminars on topics such as how to write an academic CV and how to go about planning a career in academia and hear about what career opportunities there are for those who hold a postgraduate degree in science.

The day was a huge success, and of the 14 in attendance we are very proud to say that four of those attendees have now joined the Exciton membership studying either their Masters or Doctorate degrees.

Unfortunately, due to the restrictions placed on numbers of people in labs in the 2020/21 summer the numbers of students we could host declined. But plans are for the Centre to again run the program and mini conference over the 2021/22 summer and provide the opportunity for our university’s undergraduate students to see how rewarding an academic career can be.