1. No Zone meetings were attended. However, Mount Holyoke is lucky to be involved in the Five College Academic Consortium which hosts several SPS chapters. Within the Consortium, various outreach programs and lectures are made available to interested students. Mount Holyoke SPS made such events easier to attend by organizing rides and by the creation of a new Five College Physics website (http://www.fivecolleges.edu/deptprog/physics/) which facilitates the dissemination of physics resources in the valley.

2. Katie Peek and Sara Stiltner to American Geophysical Society Annual Mtg
Phoebe Judge and Maria Hunter to Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics
At the MHC Physics Symposium, these SPS members presented papers on the recent physics research they performed:
Hannah Kolak
Phoebe Judge
Tania Henry
Muluwork Geremew
At the Five College Physics Symposium, these SPS members presented papers:
Phoebe Judge
Katie Peek
Tania Henry
Muluwork Geremew

3. Our chapter became heavily involved in the SOCKs program this year.

4. Our speakers included…
Susan Voss, Engineering Dept. at Smith College
Tiku Majumder, Physics Dept. at Williams College
Will Loinaz, Physics Dept. at Amherst College
Helmut Strey, Polymer Science and Engineering Dept. at Umass
Karl Berggren from the MIT Lincoln Labs
Steve Davis from Physical Sciences, Inc.
Corinne Manogue and Tevian Dray, Physics Dept. at Oregon State University
Susan Watson, Physics Dept. at Middlebury College

5. Our SPS chapter hosted a number of social events this year including two picnics/barbeques, weekly lunches, a Sigma Pi Sigma induction dinner, movie nights, SPS T-Shirt making, and "study" sessions.

6. One of the proudest achievements of our SPS chapter this year was the formation of an SPS Outreach group. While SPS students this year and last volunteered their time tutoring students in low income Holyoke middle schools, this year our SPS chapter decided to expand and organize this work in an attempt to reach more students at more schools. Organizing a large outreach effort in a public school proved to be more challenging than we had originally expected. However, after many conversations with superintendents, principles, teachers, and community leaders, we established a target school in Holyoke to serve as a test bed for our program. Our mission statement is broad but we feel attainable…

"The Mount Holyoke College Society of Physics Students Outreach Program is designed to couple the resources of a strong physics department and the enthusiasm of Mount Holyoke students with the experience of local teachers in order to create, implement, and preserve an exciting physics curriculum for lower and middle school students. The hope of the program is that by having the students directly engaged in designing, studying, and even playing with scientific equipment, they will not only discover the sense of accomplishment that comes with scientific exploration, but also the fun of it as well."

Working with the principle and head of the science department at the Holyoke Magnet school, we established a week long curriculum for the students centered on principles of light which culminated in SPS students traveling to the school to present demonstrations and organize interactive experiments with the students. I have attached the designed curriculum as well as a description of the demonstrations. Though the physics of light was removed from the statewide 6th grade curriculum, we created demonstrations which did satisfy the physics of energy requirement set out in the Massachussetts middle school Standards manual.
As our mission statement suggests, one of the long-term goals for this program is to be able to leave the demonstrations at the schools we visit as lasting demonstrations which can be used without MHC equipment. To attain this goal, we focused on creating flexible demonstrations which can use expensive equipment like He-Ne lasers and high-grade optics, but that can also be adapted to things like laser pointers and simple mirrors. We also are seeking out sponsorship which will hopefully finance this donated equipment. To help attain this sponsorship, we invited the media to our first presentation, and I have included the article which was featured in the Union News. A local area Radio Shack as well as a Rocky's hardware store have expressed their interest in donating supplies, and we are actively pursuing both these corporate sponsorships as well as educational grants.
Next year, we plan to expand this program into multiple schools, creating a large "Physics Circus" type demonstration to supplement our interactive classroom demonstrations. We also have begun to help organize the Holyoke Science Fair, next year providing judges and mentors to help students with their projects. The Holyoke superintendent is trying to budget for next year to allow students to travel to Mount Holyoke on a regular basis in order to participate in our mentoring/demonstration programs in a college environment. One thing which our SPS would really like to see happen is for other SPS/physics departments in the five college system to get involved with this outreach project. By publicizing our involvement during Five College Colloquia and on the Five College Website, we hope to attract broader five college student support.

7. See #6

8. As described above, our SPS integrates a weekly speaker series with an SPS lunch wherein SPS members are given a chance to personally interact with the invited guest. Because physics majors are offered course credit for attending the lectures, it would be very difficult for a physics major to get through their years at Mount Holyoke without having lunch with the SPS at least a few times. In case these lunches do not inform students of additional SPS activities, we have a large SPS activities board in our department which provides students with information about our chapter as well as information regarding National SPS and Sigma Pi Sigma. We also overhauled our website this year and officially assigned webmaster responsibilities so that our webpage effectively supplements the SPS board. A very boisterous Physics Lounge/SPS meeting room in the department hallway and even more boisterous and warm SPS students who can frequently be seen in their SPS T-shirts all serve to attract students into the MHC Physics web of fun!

9. MHC Physics alumni can always keep tabs on the happening of our SPS chapter by checking out our webpage(http://www.mtholyoke.edu/org/physics/). Additionally, "Department at Home" wherein alumni return during homecoming and graduation provide an opportunity for SPS members to meet and make contacts with past MHC Physics majors. The department also provides students with a list of MHC alumni and what fields they are working in as a way of facilitating making more of these valuable connections.

10. We did not host a Zone meeting this year, nor are we committed to hosting one soon. I would be interested to hear what the procedure for this would be.

11. See #8.

12. "Coherence collapse and redshifting in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers exposed to strong optical feedback," C. Quay, I.Z. Maxwell, and J.A. Hudgings, accepted for publication in Journal of Applied Physics, Dec. 2001
"Expanding college women's perceptions of physicists' lives and work through interaction with a physics careers website," B.W. Packard and J.A. Hudgings, accepted for publication in Journal of College Science Teaching, 2001.
"Robustness to Optical Feedback of Oxide-Confined versus Proton-Implanted VCSELs," P.A. Judge, C.H.L. Quay, and J.A. Hudgings, in preparation, to be submitted to Applied Physics Letters.
Conference Papers:
"Robustness to Optical Feedback of Oxide-Confined versus Proton- Implanted VCSELs," P.A. Judge, C.H.L. Quay, and J.A. Hudgings, 2002 IEEE/LEOS Summer Topical Meetings, Mont Tremblant, Quebec
"Comparative study of the optical feedback sensitivity of Oxide-Confined versus Proton-Implanted VCSELs," P.A. Judge, C.H.L. Quay, and J.A. Hudgings, CLEO 2002, Long Beach, CA, May 2002
"Reduction of Modal Noise in Multimode Fiber Systems Employing VCSELs versus Low-Coherence Edge-Emitting Lasers," K.M. Boates and J.A. Hudgings, OSA Annual Meeting, Long Beach, CA, October 2002

13. No official events with other clubs were held, though SPS members are involved in many other pursuits, which helps to keep our chapter's interests diverse. For example, one of our graduating members was also an astronomy major and offered star gazing nights to whomever was interested. SPS members often use our weekly lunches to publicize another on campus event that they are involved in and would like SPS members to support.

14. See #1. As I mentioned in #6, we are actively trying to expand our outreach program to involve more five college students.

15. ________

16. The over-all health of our chapter is very strong. Even though college life pulls students in every direction, our membership is highly motivated and involved. I believe that this stems from the familial atmosphere of the Mount Holyoke Physics department which is perpetuated within SPS itself. Members are friends within and outside of SPS events, which helps to maintain a strong core of active members but not to the point of ostracizing new members. The formation of the outreach program took quite a lot of time and effort which resulted in us not having a spring field trip to a local lab, as was originally planned, but I have faith that next year, now that the outreach program has been established and well grounded, our SPS will again pursue this valuable experience. Other than that, our SPS chapter has flourished this year and I have no reason to believe that this growth won't continue next year.

17. As I mentioned above, organizing events is sometimes difficult to start from scratch. The outreach handbook and SOCK produced by the National SPS was helpful but was limited in both scope and in providing personal assistance. I think that more up-dated and web-based information regarding available tours, local SPS chapters, etc. would be helpful in getting ideas from the planning to the execution stage. Additionally, though I have no specific suggestions, I think that SPS should promote student achievements more than it does. National scholarships and societies like Sigma Pi Sigma are wonderful catalysts, but more can always be done to promote student' scholarly and social achievements within local chapters.

18. see #17

19. SPS webpage: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/org/physics/
Department: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/phys/index.shtml
For alumnae contacts: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/phys/alumnae.shtml
New Five College Website: http://www.fivecolleges.edu/deptprog/physics/