During the awards ceremony at the Annual Meeting of IEEE PHOTONICS SOCIETY (formerly LEOS) on 10 November 2008, the Benelux Student Chapter has received the Most Improved Chapter Award. Being the present and past chairmen, the authors are honoured that IEEE Photonics Society recognises with this award the effort that was spent during the last years to make our student chapter a successful and inspiring organisation.
Our Student Chapter has grown lately out of the Photonics Society Benelux Chapter. Even though students were already represented in the board of the Photonics Society Benelux Chapter, several young researchers active in the chapter decided in 2004 that a separate student chapter would significantly improve the visibility and efficiency of events organised for students. As a result of their efforts, the Benelux Student Chapter was founded in 2005. In the following years and under the impulse of the consecutive chairmen—Douwe Geuzebroek, Christophe Caucheteur, Wouter Van Parys, Philippe Tassin and Milan Marell—the Student Chapter has grown and improved steadily.
One of the main aspects that make the Photonics Society Benelux Student Chapter so unique is its organisational structure. The chapter is not associated with a single university, but brings together students from all universities in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. This brings about a number of challenges, such as the organisation of our board meetings (VoIP technology is now used for most of our administrative meetings) and transport of our members to the activities. Above all, however, due the interuniversity structure the Photonics Society Benelux Student Chapter covers a large variety of subfields of photonics—from physics to fabrication—and facilitates contact between students working in these very different fields.
The main goal of the Photonics Society Benelux Student Chapter is to provide a network for our members (both master and doctoral students) and to organise activities specifically oriented to students and young researchers. These activities include a workshop, company visits and seminars on scientific and technological subjects related to optics and photonics. It is our aim to be complementary to our “parent” chapter, the Photonics Society Benelux Chapter.
The main event organised by the Photonics Society Benelux Student Chapter is the yearly IEEE Photonics Society Benelux Annual Workshop. We have turned this meeting into an easily accessible workshop, where graduate students—even in an early stage of their PhD—can get the floor to discuss their work and practice their presentation skills. Nevertheless, we ensure a professional atmosphere with, e.g., peer review by university professors and printed proceedings. An interesting programme is created by inviting speakers from international research institutes (we typically invite a Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer) and from industry. A recently graduated researcher is also invited to give a tutorial on a topic related to his/her PhD research. During the Annual Workshop, our student members can network with their peers and learn what research is done by other young researchers in the Benelux.
Besides the Annual Workshop, our spring and autumn company visits have also become a tradition. Over the past years, we have visited several major companies and research centres that are active in the Benelux’s photonics industry. Among these companies and research centres are: Anterion, Barco, Melexis, the UMC Utrecht and ASML. The ­companies were asked to set up an attractive programme, combining a visit to their production/research facilities with a presentation on the state-of-the-art optical technologies they develop or use in their products.
Our most successful event, however, is undoubtedly the most student-like activity: the yearly brewery visit. At this event, which precedes the Photonics Society Benelux Annual Symposium, we visit one of the many breweries that exist in the Benelux. We visit the brewing facilities and—needless to say—we taste the beers. The brewery visit reaches an average participation of about 85% of the Photonics Society Benelux Student Members. With such a high participation, we believe that a social event like this is essential to increase the visibility of our student chapter and to attract young researchers to our technical meetings.
In order to remain attractive, we are also working on new activities. In March of this year, the “Photonics Event” will be held for the first time. The “Photonics Event” is a career event oriented to students and companies active in the field of photonics. Students will be able to talk with engineers in the field, and graduating students can look out for a job at the job fair. With about 20 companies present, the event already promises to become a success.
We hope that we have convinced the reader that the IEEE Photonics Society Benelux Student Chapter, bringing together photonics students in the Benelux region, is a thriving chapter with many successful activities. All of this would not have been possible without all the members participating in our board since 2005; we therefore want to take this opportunity to thank all the volunteers who dedicated some of their time to make the IEEE Photonics Society Benelux Student Chapter what it is today.