SKERN 2023

If a man called Pascal, getting your feet wet, or burning while it rains isn't exactly your cup of tea, tab out now: this is between 2 skerns.

Getting wet

water had a major theme during skern, be it rain, assault courses, or building dodgy rafts (which did work!). None of us are afraid to get wet. Applying some well-earned team skills to -not- scream bloody murder when drenched.

All about teamwork, right?

Surely Skern isn't an excuse for grads to get out of the office, do a bit of outside activities and hang around... is it? 

Although it may be blur, we are fairly certain there was training.

We are very thankful for the skern team to put have put up with us and share with us their knowledge and experience when it comes to teamwork and leadership.

Finally, the pub.

No trip to Devon is complete without a trip to the pub. Until a mysterious man called Pascal decided to swindle a few of our own in pool. it was time to walk home.

Gradlympics x Tokamak Tales - Meme competition

It is a well-known fact that memes solve fusion and the good folks at Tokamak Tales decided now was the time to do their bit and host the very first Gradlympics meme competition. The idea was simple - six teams, six fusion-related memes all battling for not only the glory of winning a Gradlympics event, but also the prestige of earning a prized spot on the Tokamak Tales twitter account.

The teams were given two weeks to allow the creative juices to flow and the fruits of this fortnight were far from a dissapointment. All six memes were very high quality, with subjects ranging from the main man himself, Ian Chapman, to Zoolander. 

Whilst all of the memes were worthy or greatness there could only be one winner and for that, a judge was needed. To avoid any chance of Tokamak Tales falling into disrepute over favoritism claims, the help of an external adjudicator was aquired in the form of Bananaelectrons - a fellow fusion content creator.

After careful deliberation the ranking of the six memes was decided, leading to the selection of the top 3 memes:

3rd Place - Team F

 

2nd Place - Team E

 

1st Place - Team C

It was decided that all three of these memes would be posted to the twitter account as it seemed unfair to keep any of these memes from fusion community. All three memes were very popular with the Tokamak Tales followers however one of the highlights was Nick Hawker (the founder and CEO of First Light Fusion) retweeting Team C's meme - apparently it went down very well with the FLF team.

With that, the competition drew to a close. It was great to see the creativity of the graduate family and I'm sure everyone is looking forward to the next Gradlympics chapter.

Gradlympics 2022: The Pub Quiz

Gradlympics enters its 4th iteration this year, and we decided to kick it all off with a good old fashioned pub quiz. The scheme has grown significantly since Gradlympics was first conceived, so we now have a total of 6 teams, and over 100 players!

The team names for this year are as follows:

Team A: The Good, the Grad and the Ugly
Team B: Spicy Beryllium
Team C: H3AT, Pray, Love
Team D: DeuTEAMrium
Team E: Team (E)ter
Team F: Fungineers

And we also got some very fun mascot designs!

Now onto the actual event...

We started with an icebreaker round, as there are so many grads this year! One of the questions was 'Who has met the most famous celebrity in your group?' to which I think the best answer was 'I met the Sonic meme kid' from Team F.

The actual quiz began with some general knowledge, testing grads knowledge of space, the Olympics, politics and coffee. Turns out that the country that drinks the most coffee per capita has changed between 2020 and 2022!

A photo round was next, with some celebs that haven't changed a bit since they were a kid, and some who really have. The Fusion round was hotly contested, with the quizzee's knowing more than the hosts! Apparently JET can't actually get as hot as 300 million degrees, who would have known? The music round then had people scratching their heads with lyrics that had been run through a (bad) Shakespeare translator.

Lastly we had the 'Real or Fake' round, which was not affiliated with Kahoot, despite the slides looking suspiciously similar. I think the trickiest question on this round was:

'Which of the following is NOT a real Australian city?

A: Woolloongabba

B: Wagga Wagga

C: Burrabindi

D: Indooroopilly

 
Did you get it? The answer is C - Burrabindi! JC, one of the organisers, has actually lived in all the other cities on the list. 

 

After all the excitement, there was a brief lull of counting scores before the winners were announced. For this event, the winners were Team D: DeuTEAMrium, followed very closely by Team (E)ter and then Team C: H3AT, Pray, Love in 3rd.

Pub Quiz in the very non-pub environment of the canteen at Culham

Thanks to everyone who showed up both in-person and online and made it a good night!

The next in-person Gradlympics event will be MarioKart, followed by an actual sporting event (we promise!).

~ Written by Sophie Gribben