Over the past few weeks I have made several trips to Birmingham. First, I met with the IMA’s new liaison with the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services (AGCAS), Julie Hepburn from the Cardiff University Careers Service. We had a chat about what AGCAS and the IMA can do, and about the careers advice offered to mathematics students in universities, particularly the commonly used leaflet: “Options with mathematics.”

I’ve also visited the more maths grads project, who do some great work in mathematics enrichment at school level. We are exploring ways we can work together in areas we overlap, particularly on careers advice. Of course, a good site for careers advice is the MathsCareers website.

Lastly, I visited Birmingham to attend the LMS Popular Lectures 2008. The first of these was by Dr Tadashi Tokieda of Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge on spin in toy models, which was a very entertaining talk with some fun live demonstrations. I couldn’t stay for the whole of the second talk, which was on the mathematics of viruses by Dr Reidun Twarock of University of York called “Know your enemy – viruses under the mathematical microscope.”

I also took the opportunity to grab 5 minutes with the Co-Chair of the Birmingham undergraduate Maths Society to talk about what the IMA does and how we can work together.

Incidentally, the University of Birmingham has its own train station. Not only is this good news as there is a direct train to there from Nottingham a couple of times a day but it also provides a good image for my experience of travelling the country by train visiting universities: