Career impacts on university student volunteers in informal physics programs

Informal physics programs create learning environments where physicists, physics students, and public audiences can interact with each other. The formats of these spaces vary considerably with examples including summer camps, public lectures, open houses, and demonstration shows. Participation in informal physics spaces can be impactful for both the public audiences and the program facilitators. With our qualitative research study, we investigate the career paths of university students who volunteered in informal physics programs. We hypothesized that participation in informal programs provided impactful experiences that influenced student volunteers' career paths. We interviewed alumni who had volunteered in informal physics programs as students about their career pathways and experiences. We analyzed the data for common themes to better understand the commonalities in experiences for volunteers more broadly. The resulting themes could be of use to informal physics practitioners in better understanding and improving their own programs to support their student volunteers.