World Nuclear Student Body (D. Dharamshi, J. Sah, J. Dhingra, S. Pundir - Advocate)

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Abstract The idea is - to unite all students in the nuclear community on a single platform – to form the World Nuclear Student Body (WNSB). Given that the nuclear community is a small one, the project is realistic, with innumerable possibilities.

Apart from the networking and educational aspects of such a platform, it would offer a level playing field for students to display their skills at an international level. Teachers and professionals will be encouraged to explore the talent so that they may pick the most suitable candidate to fill an available internship or job position. Information can be disseminated to all members or relevant groups as appropriate, ensuring that every student is up to speed with the latest and greatest events in the nuclear field.

This project would be best embodied by a website. Breaching language barriers and accessibility concerns, the website will be launched in the 7 official UN languages. A student can fulfil the eligibility criteria of the WNSB by demonstrating an acute interest in any relevant nuclear related stream. No membership fee or other charges will be levied from the student members at any point in time.

A mobile application featuring ‘The Nuclear Calendar’ may also be launched to notify of any nearby events.

In previous stages, the broad scope of the project was outlined (as discussed in the ‘Mission’ and ‘Implementation’ section); and the major challenges to the project were discovered and resolved (as discussed in the section ‘Challenges and Solutions’).

Currently, the focus is towards garnering international support from regional student organizations as well as from organizations intending to invest in the student community (as discussed in the ‘International Outreach and Support’ section).

Concurrently, the database with which the members will primarily interact with will be designed. The website is scheduled to be launched in December 2016.

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Why WNSB? The two primary factors that distinguish WNSB from already existing student associations are: • •

No membership fees are to be levied from student members Fully accessible to everyone with internet connection

This would allow the project to be truly universal in its reach.

At present, there are no existing well-established organizations whose primary mission is to unite all students in the community on a single platform. Due to the unique challenges this task presents, it is imperative that this is pursued as an independent project. The student body database could then be provided for the benefit of organizations that require an easy way to reach students.

The entire project could be deployed at a minimal cost as the primary developers of the project are students like myself; and it is in our vested interest to enable entities that are able to aid the student community.

Mission We intend to maintain and provide a complete database of students in the nuclear community (hereby simply referred to as ‘students’).

WNSB would primarily serve as a sophisticated manner by which information could be disseminated to and across the students.

The project is not to be confused as an attempt to recreate or provide competitive services.

On the contrary, we would like to enable entities willing to help the students by offering an easy way to reach individual students directly – all at the click of a few buttons.

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Challenges and Solutions A project of this scale comes with its set of challenges. In this section, the foreseeable problems and their proposed solutions have been discussed.

LANGUAGE BARRIER Challenge: Connecting students from different regions requires a standard medium of communication, and not everybody speaks the same language. The UN addresses this problem by releasing all of their material in 7 languages. Building up on that idea, we can consider this multilingual approach to be a viable solution. However, translation of material at such a large scale requires capital investment that would not be economically feasible to this project.

Solution: We could enable the student members to translate important parts of the website. Since this is largely a student run organization, it does seem possible to create a community that finds the investment of time required to translate the website from English to their native language as a worthwhile cause.

Popular websites like Wikipedia and Reddit rely heavily on user contribution, and the concept works well in practice.

A free widget is available that makes it possible for authorized users to translate a website if provisions are made by the developers beforehand. Feel free to visit SiteTran.com for more information on how they implement this widget.

USER VERIFICATION Challenge: The credibility of the Student Body database relies on the information it contains to be genuine and authentic. There needs to be a way to check if each user account is: • •

Unique Accurate with respect to the information displayed on the user ‘profile’

Solution: We could offer multiple ways in which a user may verify his/her account.

• • •

Upload university ID cards Sign in using their university email ID Get their account verified by already verified users in their region

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WEB DEVELOPMENT Challenge: As the entire project will be hosted online, its success will largely rely on how well the website is developed with regards to design and functionality. Hiring expertise for this task can be quite expensive, and the website is not designed to generate any revenue on its own.

Solution: It was clear from the project’s inception that a web development team would need to be put in place which could execute the required tasks; and that this team would need to work free of charge.

Web Development as a skillset can add greatly to a student’s resume, and so I decided to take it up in December last year. As of now, I am well versed in the subject and will be part of the web development team. Other members of this team are computer science students from across the globe who wish to apply their newly learned knowledge on a live project, which could help them build a strong resume as well.

In the future, this could be pursued as an open source project with one team lead, along with student contributors donating their time to the project.

FUNDING Challenge: Having resolved the web development and translation expenses, the only other costs that remain are that associated with maintaining the servers, domain names and other software licenses; and the costs that may occur during our efforts to promote the project at international platforms.

Solution: Since the costs associated with maintaining the servers, domain names and other software licenses are small (about $500 per annum), we could rely on donations and grants, as we have been till date.

Any additional grants we may receive can then be diverted to promoting the project at conferences and student workshops.

BUY-IN Challenge: For the platform to function as intended, we will need registration and active participation from two major user bases: 1.

Student users

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2. University/Organization/Professor/Professional users Convincing either of the user base to register and participate so that the other user base has the required reason and motivation to do the same is the problem we need to resolve.

Solution: Instead of first targeting one user base over the other, we could promote the project to both user bases simultaneously, such that we may expect full participation from every avenue when the project is launched.

Refer to the ‘International Outreach and Support’ section to know more about how we intend to accomplish this.

International Outreach and Support The WNSB project started off as an entry to the Nuclear Security Multimedia Competition 2015 hosted by PNS and CRDF Global. At the time it was being developed by a small 5 member team of university students.

Having won the Multimedia Competition, the project received tremendous appreciation at the 14th IRPA Congress in Cape Town, South Africa. As a consequence, WNSB is now being developed as a joint project between students in the following countries: • • • • • • • •

Brazil India Indonesia Jordan Morocco Nigeria South Africa USA

This list of regions where we have a committed student participation will continue to grow in the near future. Many student representatives from the above mentioned countries also happen to be INMM Student Chapter Presidents elected by their respective universities, and are very well placed to promote the project in their regions.

Apart from students, associations dealing with young professionals in South Africa have shown great interest in the implementation of this project.

It is through participation in conferences and workshops like the IRPA congress that we intend to appeal to students as well as the organizations simultaneously.

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Implementation To put things into perspective, I have, with the help of a few potential real-world applications, outlined how WNSB could positively contribute to the implementation of various events and programs hosted by existing organizations.

These instances serve to show how WNSB can work in tandem with existing organizations working to promote student interests.

COMPETITIONS Each year, competitions like WNU’s Nuclear Olympiad and PNS and CRDF Global’s Nuclear Security Multimedia Competition aim to engage students in interactive and innovative ways of educating themselves.

Both the events first invite participants, and then open the submissions to a public vote. At the moment, there is no straight forward way of executing either of the tasks.

WNSB can be the ideal platform where notifications can be sent to student members eligible to apply for the events. The task of promoting the event in the most efficient manner possible – directly from the organization to the student’s notification bar – will be possible with a one single message sent by WNU and PNS and CRDF Global to WNSB’s student community.

The second task regarding opening the submissions to a public vote on the internet is more challenging than it first seems to be. Ensuring authenticity of the votes received from the internet at large can be quite a daunting task, one that even giants like YouTube struggle with. By ensuring that the member accounts on WNSB are authentic, the authenticity of the votes delivered by members of the WNSB community will automatically be ensured. Of course, this would mean that you would first need to register with WNSB to cast a vote; but in my opinion, employing this closed system can improve the transparency and credibility of votes received, without overly affecting the reach of the submissions as they will still be open to public view.

In this manner, WNSB can help organizations attract participants as well as execute certain aspects of the events. This is primarily the reason why it is crucial that WNSB and organizations like WNU, PNS and CRDF Global work together from the initial stages of the project.

OPPORTUNITIES The IAEA is one of the many organizations that posts internships and job opportunities for students and professionals alike on their website. However, there is no easy way for a student to first be introduced to all of these organizations and institutions, and then also be notified about upcoming opportunities. This is an issue that needs to be dealt with for the mutual interest of both parties.

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WNSB will provide a platform where organizations can reach their target audience with ease, at the click of a few buttons. Notifying students of events on WNSB will surely be more efficient than disseminating information via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and their respective official websites combined.

STUDENT ASSOCIATIONS At the dawn of a student’s career in the nuclear field, a student may or may not know about all the associations s/he can be a part of, both regionally and internationally. WNSB can keep a record of such associations and intimate the students in the region where they operate so that they can make an informed decision as to how best to invest their financial resources towards the membership fees of the associations, as well as what will be expected of them as members.

STUDENT COLLABORATIONS Being able to attend conferences and workshops where you share your ideas and projects with others is a great way of finding partners to collaborate with. However, not every student will have the opportunity to be part of such events due to financial or other constraints. WNSB could prove to be a viable substitute for when you wish to seek help from your fellow colleagues.

THE NUCLEAR CALENDAR This is a special feature we would like to develop as a mobile app later on. It is not scheduled to launch with the website as it will require a fully functioning WNSB to work as intended.

It’ll be designed to notify you of any nearby events you can participate in. So in case you had a trip planned to South Africa in May 2016, you would have been notified of the IRPA congress in Cape Town, for instance.

EDUCATIONAL SECTION There are plenty of resources on the internet that aid a student in his/her education. For instance, WNA, NTI and IAEA have excellent educational material on their websites.

Linking students to those various courses, in the form of an organized compilation of material could go a long way in guiding a learner through the process.

In case a collaboration can be reached, the organizations could perhaps host live links to the material on their WNSB dashboard and update it from time to time.

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Milestones •

• • • •

December 2015: Asked students all around the world to sign a petition showing their support for the establishment of the World Nuclear Student Body (refer to the ‘Conclusion’ section).

February 2016: The project ‘proof of concept’ won the Nuclear Security Multimedia Competition (NSMC 2015) March 2016: Abstract explaining WNSB accepted to be presented as a poster at the INMM 57th Annual Meet in Atlanta, Georgia.

May 2016: Presented the project as the winning NSMC entry at the 14th IRPA Congress in Cape Town, South Africa July 2016: Poster presentation scheduled at the INMM 57th Annual Meet.

In conjunction with developing the website, we wish to work together with organizations like WNU, IAEA and others so that we may be able to best enable them to interact with the Student Body via their own custom dashboard.

The project is scheduled to be launched in December, 2016.

Conclusion Before I began work on this project, I thought it would be a good idea to ask students if they actually felt the need for the World Nuclear Student Body. I asked visitors on my NSMC submission website to sign a petition stating that this is the kind of platform they would want to see established and would support in every way they can. I would have been satisfied with a couple dozen signatures, but the response we received was overwhelming.

We received over 100 signatures not only from students, but also from teachers and professionals – from 22 countries!

The need for WNSB has thus been established, and it is only a matter of time until this project is implemented. How well it is implemented will largely depend upon the assistance we receive from existing organizations.

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