I started off the day by going to a SWRI lecture bright and early at 9 o clock. Michelle and Raluca  two scientists at SWRI, gave us instructions on how to do data analysis  and to make a start on our Orbit Integration Presentations. We only had three hours to come up with a presentation , so it was a very stressful start to my morning.

After lunch, it was time to present the long term fates of our asteroids. It was very intriguing to see the fate of all our asteroids over the span of 50 million years. I don’t think any of the participants asteroids collide with Earth, so I guess we’re safe for now.

The presentations went by fast and we all headed to the lecture hall where Michelle and Raluca showed us a documentary about the Chelyabinsk meteor. The Chelyabinsk meteor was unpredicted , this made me realise how important astrophysics is in order to predict these meteor strikes. The first step in predicting asteroids or meteor impacts is to  determine their orbits, and I thought to myself, isn’t that  what we were doing for the past five weeks? So I guess we could say that this summer we all contributed to science!

Finally it was time to go to the Talent Show! It had been a long day, but I was more exhilarated rather than exhausted. We were all anxiously practicing our parts for the show before we all took our seats and our MC’s, Siyona and Nikhilesh commenced the night. The show started off with the musical talents, with pianos, violins and guitars. There was some dancing as well. I was a part of the line dancing group. The night started fairly relaxing with the classical piano and the harmonious flute pieces but soon it got chaotic when Lucien and Staś started the tortilla slap challenge, suddenly the scene changed from peaceful, melodious music to tortilla’s flying around the room.

Other highlights of the night were Dr. Rengstorf’s speech on the importance of teachers and Dr. Lê sang a meaningful song by a Vietnamese singer, Trịnh Công Sơn.

The Talent Show ended and I rushed to the computer lab to download all the lecture materials and programming projects, as the reality hit me that we only have one more day left in this program. We all hung out at Domenici for a while, and soon headed back to our dorms.

My name is Hardev and I’m a rising senior at St Caimins Community School in Shannon, Ireland. I love physics, engineering and anything else STEM – related. In my spare time I like to play basketball with my friends and go for walks or runs in the morning.

The post The Talent Show!! first appeared on SSP International.

If you told me, even a week before June 23rd that I’d be running to a class on black holes at 9 in the morning on a sunny Friday morning during the summer, I’d have taken that info and thrown it out the door. But here I am, a month and a couple days into the Summer Science Program(sometime wish it was Summer Sleep Program).

Two hours into a hands on, brain exercise, my boy Sean and I are cracking our heads at some differential equations problem that relates to some celestial entity. I am genuinely tweaking because I’m tryna get this done and play some brawl stars with my homie Joey. But, at least Dr. Le calls time and then gives us the most fascinating talk about not science, but himself. We knew there was some lore in his life, cause his mysterious aura doesn’t go unnoticed. We truly learned about the “gravitational forces” in his life.

And then we’re off, early even today. My def-not favorite TA Lucien and a couple of us start heading towards the Panda Express on campus, the only eatery other than our dining hall on campus. We got some crazy good grub, including my favorite Cream Cheese Rangoons and Veggie Spring Rolls!!! With a stomach full and content, I opened my fortune cookie to top it all off. I open it, and it’s, “You’re gonna gain some confidence or sum.”

…..ermmmm … .as my teammate Tut likes to say….WhAt the SiGMa??? What is this cryptic message?? Like genuinely, anything but, this. Hey I’m grateful, but this is why I don’t find truth in fortune cookies. “To be or not to be?” – Somebody smart, someday, somewhere. But, I eat, and then I drag myself and big boy Max who’s already out sleeping on the table at Panda Express, along with the rest of my homies back to the afternoon session with Dr. Rengstorf.

Right after an amazing AMA session with Dr. R, where he lowkey gave us some crazy life advice that I might take to the grave, my teammates and I eagerly got to work finishing up our last set of images as we finally got a fourth set of observations to look at. We finished that up and finally got our long awaited stickers, nearly completing every part of the sticker chart, something the TA’s kindly put up for us.

And the night started to wrap up soon after a full stomach at dinner, sitting with my other favorite TA, Kathryn and our squad. As we worked hard through the night to get our final code in before our OD report was due the next day But you know the night doesn’t go out without a bang…and a lil crazy stunts. Kevin ended up getting a makeover by my the homies Grace and Siyona. I think he might have ended up becoming their project for their talents, and might become the next model for vogue.

And that’s a wrap on a great day. With only a few more left, I’m going to miss these people and the experiences and memories I’ve gathered. But you know what, that’s life and we’ll remember each other, and look forward to the day we all meet again, with more stories in store. To forever..and beyond!!! – Buzz Lightyear or sum

My name is Nikhilesh and I am a rising senior from Valencia High School in Santa Clarita, California. I love working out, having deep conversations and just messing around in general. But, most importantly, the friends I’ve made at SSP are just something else. It truly has been what they said it would be: An educational experience of a lifetime!!!

The post T-Minus Collision: All Hands On Deck first appeared on SSP International.

After pausing on the data analysis for our n-body simulations—programs that analyze how our asteroids will move through the solar system over millions of years—we left our code to run overnight and headed back to the dorms. Until curfew, we stayed in the dorm lobby chatting with TAs, watching Spider-Man, and playing cards.

Then, I went back to my dorm and packed a bit before heading to sleep.

A very, very short 5 hour nap later, the 29th officially started with the walk to Corbett and a penultimate breakfast at the high table. (The high table: the one long table in the dining hall. Meant to fit 18, but capable of hosting 22.) Breakfast was interspersed with some last minute talent show prep—poem and Taylor Swift parody writing.

Next up was a short lecture in Domenici, and then back to the Bio Annex for data analysis and slideshow making. Most of my time was spent making a few more animations, and of course, adding color palettes to my graphs (colorsys for the win).

Unfortunately, while trying to make a gif, a suspicious interface was downloaded onto my computer. After the subsequent half an hour of trying to get my computer to open a browser other than Yahoo, I was returned to Google Chrome (thanks, Jalen)!

Because of the exciting Yahoo virus encounter, I had to rush a bit to add my graph to my group’s slideshow. However, with some serious teamwork, we completed our final graphs, broke for lunch, and came back to practice before each group presented. Of course, there was a brief break for more talent show rehearsal between trial slide show runs. (We successfully memorized approximately ten percent of the parody we were singing.)

The main academic event of the day was our presentations, where each group gave a rundown of their asteroid’s eventual fate. For 2012 FN62, we found ejection from the solar system to be the most likely outcome. Of course, there were the 8 out of 156 test clones that plummeted into the sun instead—as everyone found slightly humorous, I found those cases a lot more fun. Each group had only five minutes, so there was a lot of data to run through quite fast.

12 successful presentations later, we headed back to Domenici for a last SWRI lecture before card games and the final dinner at Taos. One last table of students and faculty (although no assigned seats today) and one last set of announcements from Dr. F; it was quite bittersweet.

After dinner, we returned to the dorms, where I still had to finish my poem before the talent show an hour later. Luckily, the poem was successfully written, and everyone made it to Science Hall on time.

The talent show, of course, was one of our final SSP traditions; a perfect cap on a day strangely full of lasts. There were many amazing student (and faculty) performances, from music to paper-tower-building, rock stacking, poem reading, paper-airplane folding, or card tricks. Somehow, the three hours of talents passed very quickly, and by the end of Harry and Ze’s amazing Minecraft-esque final poem, it was already 10 PM (early by SSP standards, I know).

We took one final nighttime walk back from the Bio Annex, and all headed up to the third floor. In an idea that originated somewhere back in week 3, Samantha and Steinnun did my makeup outside of the game room, which led to much giggling (but luckily negligible eye poking). After a few photos, we ventured down to the remains of a soccer game and then recruited a few more people to head out to our dorm lawn and stargaze.

Stargazing was super cool; we saw several meteors (and got bitten by several mosquitos), but mostly just spent a while chatting. By the time we headed back into the dorms, there was just enough time left before curfew for one final game of fish. (Fish: some people have cult movies. SSPers have cult card games.) With a few minutes to spare before curfew, we headed to bed for the second to last time at SSP.

The post NMSU Astro II: Day 34 first appeared on SSP International.

We were so happy this morning that we ate pizza and partied until 1. And then we slept. I woke up at 10 by my alarm because I planned a super productive morning practicing piano. But I still felt like partying, so I decided to scroll on my phone for 45 minutes.

Practice eventually started around 12, in which I was trying to shape the last big part of my talent show. With the talent show approaching, all of us are trying to steal the keyboard room even for five minutes (and I am not kidding, because Ian entered the keyboard room when I left, which was 15 minutes before lecture). We probably all thought OD was the end of SSP….  

The afternoon passed fast because we were all happy and happy time flies fast. We were all enjoying our happy coding time, totally reading the worksheet thoroughly. Gio, Ava and I finished our progress check before 5, and then after that, we started admiring our OD report.  

Now, the really interesting things started happening after dinner and the morning after, because we finally started analyzing and interpreting our data with the pressure of the afternoon presentation. Many groups pointed out the periodic oscillations of perihelion and apehelion of our asteroids and potential sources of other behavior, like a sudden change in orbit size (we suspected it was due to approaching planets).

I also started processing our pretty image, taken with SII, H-alpha, OIII filters: 

This is not the final draft, by the way. Photoshop is where all the magic happens. And before I figured out how pixel math works, our image looked horribly….horrible. 

And we can process more/ analyze more of our asteroid when we go back home, because all of it is freeware! 

I also practiced more piano…. While I was doing that, Arrival was played in the classroom. According to Amber, it was horrifying.

That marked the end of our day.

Hi, my name is Jasmine and I’m from China, Dongguan. During my spare time I like sleeping, playing piano, stargazing and post-processing pretty images!

The post End of OD, SwRI First Day  first appeared on SSP International.

Today began like most days, except an hour later. Since yesterday was the last day of lecture, and today is entirely devoted to the OD Report, we got to sleep in an extra hour. Frankly, I didn’t think the report would be too difficult, especially since me and my team had already written six pages of it, but this beast was on an entirely different level. The time between breakfast and midnight was a frenzy with a seemingly impossible amount of both relief that we might actually finish the report, and anxiety due to the realization that I still had to learn how to write down 58 equations onto a document using some markup language only physicists and mathematicians use called LaTeX. Not only that, but the realization that we had to format those equations along with all of the tables, graphics, and text needed to write a semi-legible scientific paper made the evening stressful enough that it could easily be considered a high-risk situation by the American Heart Association for anyone with remotely high blood pressure.

However, after an exhausting number of edits, proofreads, and questions posed to TAs about how to format a LaTeX document to make it into a single column, midnight neared and Dr. Rengstorf started a countdown in the computer lab to kindly remind us of the deadline, which everyone in the building was devoting every ounce of their being towards. Soon, Dr. R started blasting, to the thanks of literally no one in the entire building, the Final Countdown by Europe and the submissions started rolling in. I am glad to say that Team 7, JAG Underpants: International, was one of the first teams to submit, finishing 15 minutes before the deadline. As the clock struck midnight and teams scrambled to submit their reports, there were cheers and tears celebrating the fact that we actually did it, we finished SSP! We defeated the final boss, and the celebrations were set to begin.

Downstairs, the faculty had a surprise for us, pizza AND Lucien’s COKE! We devoured 6 boxes of pizza, and then spent the night, dancing and singing in the classroom, before moving to the dorms and getting shut down by Dr. R and Mrs. Martinez. THE PUNISHMENT: parent phone calls and a shortened curfew. I guess it’s time to fix my sleep schedule. We’re DONE!

P.S. There was a DLC.

Hey, I’m Gio, a rising senior from Vallejo, CA. I really like physics (not astrophysics though thanks to the first pset). I spend my time lifting weights, running, and having fun with my friends.

The post WE’RE DONE! first appeared on SSP International.

Today, I began my day walking back to Pinon at 12:30 AM after a long day of bioinformatics. 

As usual, Brett, Kano, and I walked to Foster for the morning lectures. We attended lectures from Ms. Alexa, Ms. Ceilidh, Mr. Shakil, and Mr. Joey. Today’s lectures were quite interesting from the line dancing in Ms. Alexa’s lectures to Ms. Ceilidh’s hip-hop dance tutorial. We still had to finish our posters to be submitted for printing, so I spent my lunch looking over the sequences for any potential mutations. 

After lunch, Dr. Duffy’s lecture horrified me for the hopeless future of antibiotics. The lecture made it seem we are all going to die due to the antibiotic resistant bacteria. However, our group felt especially relieved after a few all-day work sessions once the poster was sent to be printed. The rest of the day was spent relaxing and talking to other genomics participants.

Sunday

6 AM, me and Brettt woke up to my peaceful yet horrifying alarm. I wanted to go on a hike at least once during my stay at NMSU, so I was looking forward to this astounding experience. The first 3 hours were easy as the terrain was mostly smooth, but when we started to climb the mountain, that’s where things got really difficult. We were on all fours, desperately clinging to the few but stable boulders that ensured our safety on the rugged mountain side. The view once we reached the top was spectacular, validating the hard work and persistence of our climb. 

Photos were taken courtesy of Lucas Beltran.

The worst part of the hike was yet to come. While climbing down the mountain, I slid over 20 times, nearly slide tackling Emily off the side of the cliff. The limited water in my bag ran out during the first half of the hike, so the next 2 hrs were a living nightmare, with the excessive dehydration and cramps on my body. At the end of the trip, I looked down at my shoes, worn-out and torn, rethinking my choices for this hike. However, putting aside all the dreadful experiences I faced, I consider this hike to be one of the most rewarding things I’ve done, as I persisted through and accomplished a 10 mile hike without any prior experience.

Photo taken by Dr. Messner halfway up the mountain.

The post NMSU Genomics – Day 25 (last one!): Vageesh’s Blog first appeared on SSP International.

I continued my morning in the lab! Today’s procedure consisted of a transformation where we got to make more hopefully resistant Vibrio natriegens by making the bacteria take up the resistance gene. After hitting Dr. Duffy with the , I recently learned from him that throwing up the peace sign translates to the middle finger back in Scotland (oops). So to all the Scottish people I threw peace signs at in my life, I only mean love!!

After lab, I headed off back to Pinon Hall for my routine beauty nap. It was much needed rest for the unexpectedness of Miss Ceilidh’s and Miss Alexa’s TA talks.

Being born and raised in Texas, you would think I’d have the art of line dancing instilled in me since birth. Let me just say that is definitely not the case. Miss Alexa’s TA talk consisted of teaching us how to line dance where we learned line dancing to “Shivers” and “Cotton Eye Joe” With all its repetitive movements, I did eventually get the hang of it.

We were not done with dancing yet. Miss Ceilidh TA talk was learning a choreographed dance to the song “Yeah” by Usher, one of the best songs to jam out to I will say.

Our sweaty selves walked over to the lecture room for our guest speaker, Dr. Juliet Johnston where she talked about microbial wastewater treatment and queer science.

It was then dinner time. Over these five weeks, I eventually gravitated to these three foods: french fries, grilled chicken, and ice cream. A balanced meal I would say! I sat with Angelina, Eva, and Mr. Joey where we discussed fraternities and places we’ve been to.

We returned back to the lab after dinner to finish off our transformation experiment where Michael went crazy with the ethanol bottle and we drew a Rolex on Hugo’s lab coat.

Also spent time signing other people’s lab coats. A bittersweet moment indeed. Realizing that we officially only have 5 days left here, I am reminded of how much I won’t miss the dry heat or the cockroaches scattered across our dorms, but instead, the people I have gotten to know so well over these short five weeks.

The rest of the night was spent grinding out our posters and manuscripts. Every few minutes, it’s essential that I brain rot from the chaoticness of all this work and I somehow end up at the vending machine on the first floor of Foster. I have made so many mindless trips to the vending machine that I have discovered the perfect vending machine combo. Twix and cookies and cream Hershey bars. Thank you to the big backs, Kano and Arthur, for putting me on <3.

I walk back to the dorms with a sinking feeling. Not because I just consumed three Hershey bars, but because I have one day less to be with my closest friends.

The post NMSU Genomics – Day 24: Emily’s Blog first appeared on SSP International.

ᴠᴏʟᴜᴍᴇ  : ▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯

0:57 ━━━•──────── 3:59

⇄  ◃◃   ⅠⅠ   ▹▹  ↻

“It’s time to go to Carlsbad!” is what I wished I would’ve thought when I woke up this morning. Like an SNP being the difference between antibiotic resistant bacteria and non-resistant bacteria, one might even say, a singular event can be the difference between a broken heart and an intact heart. (Queue “Hundred Broken Hearts” by ENHYPEN) Even if we can’t go, the TAs and Mr. Steinman are plotting a bombastic and chocked full of activities Saturday for us, so I’ll trust the process. One of the things I’ve had to learn at SSP is the ability to adapt, just like our lovely Vibrio natriegens. Sacrificing breakfast in exchange for sleep has become a common practice that’s enabled by my roommate Emily, who also enjoys waking up later. Being the vampire (New Yorker) that I am, I always have an umbrella against the New Mexico rays that reach UV values over 10. And so, umbrella in hand, I walked to Foster Hall to start another day at SSP (Summer Sleeping Program). 

There’s never a dull moment in the superior lab group Fanum Taxonomy. I mean, what other group is burning a hole through their lab coat with a loop, sticking their finger into a bacterial plate, getting their hair singed off by a bunsen burner, and inhaling ethanol until it burns our eyes and lungs? Today, we spent the morning in the lab doing PCRs. Since we can’t go a day without being silly, we happened to forget which primers our group was given, but thanks to Ms. Ceilidh, we eventually figured it out. 

We all then headed down to the dungeon/lecture room to intensively work on our bioinformatics, research papers, and posters. As any good student knows, though, the brain needs breaks for efficiency’s sake. Thus, we embarked on our usual brain refreshing activities that range from practicing on monkeytype to playing Brawl Stars to watching beautiful, youthful men dance and sing. Between Vageesh’s manic mutation hunt with our glorious king Mr. Shakil’s tutelage and my side quests (much to Chloe’s dismay), our poster is looking a tad bit spacious, but fear not! Throughout heaven and earth, locked in Fanum Taxonomy alone is the honored one.

Instead of going to the dining hall, we picked up packaged lunches and headed back to the dorms. Efforts to organize dance practices for the impending talent show during lunch breaks have sadly been futile. Arion, Klara, Ryan, and I were planning to dance to “Magnetic” by ILLIT, but the Haidilao dance and “Good night, ojou-sama” by ASMRZ have been distracting us. Perhaps we’ll add it in? Writing a rap to “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar might be the move (sorry Drake fans). Our talent show is on the upcoming Monday, and I can’t wait to see what my fellow participants have cooked up the past six weeks. I’ve heard rumors of a Tequila performance and a spreading session. Dr. Duffy was singing praises about the talent show last year, so I’m fully prepared to blow him away. If all goes wrong, we can just say it was a comedy act; we’ll be entertaining for sure.

Our work throughout the rest of the day consisted of rotating through steps for our transformation using known antibiotic resistance genes and continuing to procrastinate on our research paper and poster. Well, some groups were locked in. We just didn’t happen to be one of those groups.

Mr. Steinman, per his wife’s order, bought us Papa John’s pizza for dinner to reward us for our hard work. He unfortunately laced our dinner with a physics lesson, where he discussed Gauss’s Law and other topics my bio brain can’t comprehend. It was my first time trying Papa John’s, and since I hadn’t eaten anything throughout the day, I was definitely a big back. Fanum Taxonomy is still waiting on the ice cream that Dr. Catalan promised. A while ago, during the time our chemostat was exploding every day, Dr. Catalan said he would buy us ice cream if it exploded again. Thankfully, or maybe not thankfully, it did explode. He has also mentioned getting tacos for everyone, so it seems Dr. Catalan’s wallet may soon face an economic downfall. I hope the benevolent higher ups of SSP can cover this for him.

After another day of finishing up late, I walked back to the dorms with Ritisha. We ran a bit, which is uncommon for a League of Legends player like myself, to catch up with Penichillin plus Arion, but only Klara waited for us. The others say I have a slow walking pace, but I think I’m just enjoying my surroundings. The number of skunks I’ve seen in New Mexico is probably more than the sum of skunks I’ve seen in my life prior to SSP. The  resident cockroaches also come out at night, giving us the occasional fright on our walks. Though some may say there’s not a lot to do in Las Cruces, the lack of light pollution lets you see the sky clearly. I even saw a shooting star once here. Wondering what my wish was? It’s a secret. 

I dropped off my bookbag in my dorm before heading out on a walk with Ritisha, Ryan, and Vicky. Our TAs were feeling kind, so they extended our curfew from 10:00 pm to 11:00 pm. We made a trek to Garcia Hall just a few minutes away. The vending machines in Foster are depleted of our beloved Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme, but the Garcia machines were luckily stocked up. Though I usually swear off caffeine and rely on willpower, I felt like indulging in a Starbucks Mocha bottle. 

Vicky and Ritisha were feeling sleepy, so we walked back with them before we ran into Arion. Thus, Arion, Ryan, and I took another walk. According to my health app, my lowest steps per day the past year was in December, where I averaged approximately 2,200 steps a day. Yikes, I know. Here, I’m averaging about 10,000 steps per day. SSP (Summer Steps Program) is really getting us nerds into shape. 

Once the clock struck 11:00 pm, we dashed to our rooms for the room checks, wrapping up our second to last Wednesday on July 24th, 2024. 

Side note: I ended up not sleeping at all. My willpower combined with caffeine is too powerful.

Miss Ceilidh said I could do some side quests after I blog about my day, so here I go. 

I was going to make a tierlist of the participants, but I figured that’d be unethical. Instead, I’ve decided to do superlatives. Please keep in mind this was a joint effort and many opinions were included. 

We almost never know when something will be our last. White Sands became our last field trip after Carlsbad was canceled. Our last Target run was our last Target run and maybe the cockroach you killed today was the final cockroach of your stay here, or maybe even today was the last time we’ll ever hear Dr. Duffy scold us for being late to class. I surely hope today was the last impromptu physics lesson from Mr. Steinman. Jokes aside, every moment here feels precious, and I’ll genuinely miss everyone. Thus, I’ll have no shame in being sappy. I may never have the chance to be sappy again. 

To any parents, I love your child. I love you for creating and raising my friends. Sorry if that sounded weird. To any future applicants or participants, trust the process. To any of my fellow participants, I love you. Let’s meet again one day. To any faculty that may be reading this, I love you. Thank you for everything. To any other individual reading this, how are you still here? I appreciate it, though. 

Until we meet again,

Angelina 

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

The post NMSU Genomics – Day 23: Angelina’s Blog first appeared on SSP International.

But I won’t waste my blog post by dwelling on the past and reiterating what previous posts have likely covered.

Today, I awoke at the usual hour of 7:30. After the arduous task of dragging myself out of bed, I found myself departing the dormitories around 8:40. As I meandered between the shade provided by various trees on campus, I endeavoured to avoid the lethal laser that is known as the sun, which has been responsible for the relentless 40°C+ weather. Being Canadian, I have yet to acclimatise to the oppressive heat of New Mexico. Each time I step into the sweltering temperatures of Las Cruces, I find myself yearning for the 10 cm of snow and the -40°C cold that are commonplace in my city.

P.S. metric is the better measurement system

But enough about the weather; back to my walk to the lecture halls.

As I walked, I pulled out my phone to undertake my daily ritual of checking the news, social media, and my schedule. After replying to messages from friends back home, I opened the ever-convenient Google Calendar and discovered that, instead of the usual lectures on Maths, Physics, and Astrometry from Dr. R, Dr. Anderson, and Dr. Le, we would be having “TA talks.” Perplexed yet intrigued, I continued my walk to the lecture halls.

Upon arrival, instead of the customary intro slide on the board it was Dr. R waiting to make a short talk.

Once Dr. R explained, I found out that today there would be four “lectures” from the TA’s about any topic they would like. It would be structured that Stas and Kathryn would present in the morning session and Lucien and Michelle in the afternoon session.

Starting the lectures off would be Stas, who apparently felt the need to do his talk in an ostentatiously shiny gold dress and heels.

Being true to form, Stas had selected an academic topic for his talk: tensors and his research on using ray-tracing to create images of black holes at Georgia Tech.

Although the lecture was quite challenging to grasp, Stas ensured it was highly interactive, which significantly aided my comprehension.

After an hour and a half, we were granted a brief ten-minute respite before Kathryn’s talk about her experiences in game development and the intersection between STEM and the arts.

It was fascinating to see how Kathryn and her sister leveraged their expertise in game development, as well as art and music, to create “Save the Princess Gayme.”

After her insightful lecture and the usual lunch at the Corbett Student Union, the afternoon proceeded in a similar fashion.

Lucien delivered a talk about his life and his experiences at SSP in Biochem (worse than Astro) 2019. His tales of late-night lab sessions and the camaraderie formed during those intense weeks painted a vivid picture of his journey.

Michelle rounded off the day with an engaging talk about the topics in computer science she is passionate about, including natural language processing (NLP) and other intriguing subjects. Despite my lack of personal bias towards CS, I found her presentation quite captivating.

Following these TA lectures, our team, as always, got down to work, adding the final touches to our MPC report to prepare it for provisional review. Ian and I completed the photometry for the last couple of observations, ensuring everything was in perfect order.

Today was a pleasant departure from the usual six hours of lectures. While those lectures are generally enjoyable, they can become rather repetitive. Activities like today’s TA talks, although not as flashy as the field trips, embody the essence of SSP. It’s not just about the academics; it’s about the relationships you build with friends and TAs. The numerous inside jokes woven into the TA presentations highlighted just how close we’ve become in just four and a half weeks.

I look forward to strengthening these connections in the final week of the programme. As Lucien wisely said in his presentation, it’s all about “making the most out of the experience.”

Hi, my name is Max. I am a rising Senior from Calgary, AB, Canada. I love participating in science and engineering fairs, working on robotics projects, and I’m also a sports shooter (10M Air Pistol) and an avid fan of all motorsports. In my free time, I enjoy photography, building robots, and watching Formula One!

The post Max D. Blog Post first appeared on SSP International.

July 23rd, a big day to celebrate some birthday. Wait, did I say some? Yes, let’s wish happy birthday to our dear 2024 SSP participant, the very nice and lovely…(Drumrolls please)…Heather! 

And happy birthday to……Uchiha Sasuke! From Naruto (sorry). 

July 23rd was a great day for both some huge surprises and huge chaos. Just to recap, we had the last lecture of Quantum Mechanics from 9:00 am to 11:00 am, and a guest lecture from Dr. Jason Jackiewicz for the afternoon. Then…Ok, let’s stop here, and we’ll get into the details now. 

For Dr. Anderson’s morning lecture, he released us around an hour early, so that we can work on our OD code. There, my teammate Sean and I (Unfortunately our team only has two people) decided on the pretty pictures we wanted to take images of. Our first choice was the Lagoon Nebula, with the first alternative being the Cat’s Paw Nebula and the second alternative being the Pinwheel Galaxy. Sean confidently said that he could represent the team, so he would be attending the pretty pictures meeting at 1:00pm. 

After lunch, I wanted ice-cream, good ice-cream, so I ignored the ice-cream offered at the cafeteria, and I marched to the Book Store with Amanda and Amber. At the Book Store, we ordered Frappuccino from Starbucks (technically, that’s not ice-CREAM, but it’s better than cafeteria ice-cream). It was at this moment that Amber made an adventurous decision: she wanted to order a new flavor, something other than Mocha Frappuccino. How wonderful! We suggested her to order the Chocolate Cookie Crumble Cream Frappuccino, which she agreed with a joyous smile on her face. 

And guess what? The Book Store Starbucks ran out of cookie crumble! 

Well, sadly, no adventures for anyone today. Amber ordered the usual Mocha Frappuccino. 

On the way back, Dr. Rengstorf sent the observing choices for our pretty pictures. I looked at team 12, which is my team, and discovered that we did not get the Lagoon Nebula! (╯▔皿▔)╯

Now let’s travel to the future. I asked Sean a day or two later why he didn’t get the Lagoon Nebula. He said that it’s because they made the decision based on a 12-sided dice. Guess what? The first person picked the Lagoon Nebula (Which coincidently appeared to be Team 8, the team who had the same asteroid 1999 JN3 as us). 

Okay, we like democracy, so I’ll take it. Cat’s Paw Nebula is pretty cool. Yes. 

The afternoon lecture was about the Sun and starquakes, but that is not the most important thing. What’s more important is that we had this guest lecture combined with Astro II, and right after the lecture, the program discovered that someone in Astro II caught COVID! 

Then there was chaos. We wiped our dorms, wore masks, and sat in separate tables for dinner. By the way, I actually had a lower risk of catching COVID or any other viruses because I had neither a roommate nor suitemates. But except from that, things are just terrible. The N95 mask was itching my nose, and it was hard to breath. 

Also, by the way, on the way to Domenici, my dear friend Jasmine observed a bunch of pigeons on the grass. She tried to catch one, but she failed unfortunately but expectingly. I have a video, but I can’t post it because she didn’t consent, so here’s a picture of her:

We worked intensively on our MoG codes for the next few hours. Well, it’s actually mostly me because I wrote the code on Saturday and tried for three days, attempting to debug it and failed. In fact, I dragged our TA Lucien over the whole night to try to debug it, but I failed to complete it by midnight, sadly. Spoiler alert, I did finish it tomorrow though. 

Around 8pm, we celebrated Heather’s birthday with apple pies (wait, what about Sasuke’s birthday?). Since we didn’t have eating utensils, the guys started an eating contest, eating a slice of the pie with only their mouths.

That was a pretty exciting day. Up until the point that we got notified of this unfortunate news: our field trip to Carlsbad Caverns, on July 24th, was cancelled due to this COVID incident. Nooooooo /(ㄒoㄒ)/~~

And this unfortunate news ends my blog for July 23rd. Thank you for reading…Nope. No, no, no. Sadly, I had a long day. I also have a late observing shift today. 

The observing went pretty well, with our team finally focusing the telescope. The team before us tried to mess up the focus, I believe, but they forgot to change the default focus, so it did nothing. 

During the shift, we talked with our TA Mr. Kowalski about QoD 30 (wear professional suits/dresses for, spoiler’s alert, the theatre trip tomorrow with bonus points for denying gender norms). My teammate Sean somehow decided to wear a dress, and since he’s too tall to borrow anyone else’s, he decided to wear a toga. 

We will end the blog here because sadly, our data for this night was not good enough to find our asteroid. We end up not using this data, sadly. 

This truly concludes my blog for July 23rd. Thank you for reading this long blog. 

Sincerely, 

Eileen

This is the start of the blog for July 24th: 

Yes, it is me again. Why? Because the 23^rd was actually not supposed to be my blog date, but I covered for another participant because I wanted to type more. This Monte Carlo is literally taking a century to run. I regret putting in 1 million iterations. 

Anyways, we were going to have a field trip to Carlsbad Caverns, but it got cancelled due to COVID. We were supposed to not have a field trip, but our lovely Site Director Ms. Martinez arranged an alternative for us. According to TA Mr. Kowalski, he fought for us to see Despicable Me 4 after the cancellation. 

However…Do you remember? QoD 30? 

Yes, apparently, most people went on a burning hot day, 34 degrees Celsius (sorry I’m Chinese), in suits. Yes, suits, because Mr. Kowalski and a few other guys were the only people who wore dresses. 

(IMG_3980 here please)

Mr. Kowalski had this luxurious, luminous, eye-catching dress that anyone could have worn. My friend Amber had commented that if you cover up his head, the dress unexpectedly matched Mr. Kowalski’s body. 

By the way, yes actually by the way, Sean tried to wear a toga (and he tried to let our TA Lucien put that on too). He got stopped unfortunately because we’re not allowed to bring bed sheets out of our dorm rooms.

Then there were the crazy bus trips. Can you imagine? 37 people with suits and dresses were crowding in a bus station, waiting for the bus. 

Please understand that this was not a field trip arranged in advanced, so therefore, we understand that a lot of things could go wrong. We thank Ms. Martinez greatly for arranging this trip for us, and we appreciate this trip neglecting all the things that did went wrong. 

On the way to the theatre, we were about 30 minutes late, and missed the start of the movie, but it’s fine because the movie was not heavily plot based. On the way back, however, it turned out that the bus was not coming for some reason, and we have to all wait in a Starbucks (yes, it’s Starbucks again) store to wait to be shuttled back to New Mexico State University. We left the theatre around 5pm; by the time everyone returned, it was around 7pm. 

It’s fine, though, because we got great images and laughter, which overcomes the hot heat and the time we’ve waited.

I spent the rest of the time working which gladly, verifying intermediate values with my dear friend Rachel, I found the error and got my MoG code working. What a nice day

Sincerely,

Eileen

Eileen: rising senior from Germantown Academy, Fort Washington, PA. She loves to play a variety range of video games, the recent ones being Terraria, Project Sekai, and Ark Knights. She also plays tennis and violin, and she recently tried to compose music, for classical orchestra and for modern trap music. As you can tell, she’s a little wordy online, but she’s actually relatively quiet in real life.

The post Blog July 23rd + 24th first appeared on SSP International.