This week in the office has been very quiet as SPIE is currently hosting one of its most popular exhibitions, Optics and Photonics, in San Diego which many staff members from the various departments attend. Shame I couldn’t have gone to really experience and visualize the core of what SPIE is about, their exhibitions….and not to mention the exciting location! To help with the preparations, I focused my efforts on Twitter, finding and ‘following’ relevant companies/people of interest as my PR manager is keen to increase activity on the social networking site and provide live updates from the event this week. It is great to be working on such a relevant topic in today’s society as companies continually create new ways to keep in contact with their audience. They also launched an iPhone application at the event in a bid to provide live feeds and updates to attendees so I will be intrigued to find out if that has been successful.

I am still continuing work on the Advancing the Laser celebrations by writing content to be published on the website. The work entails three sections;

• ‘Institutes Advancing Laser Technology’ which highlights various different ways in which key laser institutes have contributed to the advancement of laser technology and how they may shape our future with new applications
• ‘Lasers for a Better World’ articles highlight ways in which lasers are employed to improve life
• ‘Memoirs’ are a collection of comments from directors, or other representatives, from leading laser institutes reminiscing on past experiences from the industry relating to laser development

Within marketing, I am working on a new project surrounding the 2010 rebrand. SPIE publishes many different brochures at the various stages leading up to the exhibition that all require ‘blurbs’, namely the ‘Call Stage’ where scientists and researchers are invited to submit abstracts detailing their work and also the ‘Advanced Stage’ which aims to increase attendance at the event. These blurbs are generally small boxes or bursts with key information informing, providing benefits or trying to provoke a response from the audience. My task has been to review the collateral that has been published and collect the various different blurbs that have been used in order to compare and contrast different approaches. The aim of the project is to provide a coherent and unified look across the collateral resulting in less variation in the content published. We will therefore come up with a final file of blurbs that are to be used by members of the team, saving time in designing new ones each time with differing messages, ensuring consistency.

I have also had an interesting conversation with a friend regarding University fees. I am so more appreciative of our situation in Scotland where we get our fees paid and require only living costs. Here they have to pay for all fees themselves, which from what I gathered is more than they are at home anyway, on top of living costs. Parents here often start saving as soon as the child is born so they can send them to college but for many this is not a viable option. Similar to the UK, loans and grants are available on a means-tested basis, but they are obviously left in a lot more debt. Which lead to me to the question, do as many students go to college in America as in the UK? I don’t know the exact answer but I assume availability of finance must be a large barrier holding many students back from achieving their full potential. My friend pointed out that many students actually wait until they are older and have saved some money to attend Community Colleges, which are a cheaper option.

We had a weekend in Bellingham last week, which was really nice to catch up on some much needed sleep and do some more exploring. Bellingham has the most amazing Farmers Market on a Saturday morning, so we often buy organic fruit and vegetables from there as they are so delicious! As well as selling all kinds of food (the best Greek gyro I have ever tried!) they have many stalls selling arts and crafts, clothes, jewellery as well as many musicians lining the streets. It is therefore a great family atmosphere and is always full of people enjoying themselves. On Sunday, a colleague kindly volunteered to take us on a tour of the beautiful mountains that line Bellingham’s faraway skyline. It was a very hot day and was uphill most of the way, partly through forests, so I certainly struggled but the pain was so worth it! We hiked Damfino lakes rather than the larger and most famous Mount Baker so that we could get an even better view and it was simply amazing. There is still snow on all the mountains, much to our amusement as we passed a large block, despite the heat, which looks stunning up against the clear blue skies.

After our peaceful weekend, Vegas awaits!