Today is our 19th day at SSP, which already marks the halfway point to becoming SSP alumni.
I woke up at 8:20 am. We spend a surprisingly little amount of time in our dorms, and after twenty minutes getting ready, I headed out and wouldn’t be back until 1 in the morning. We had a morning lecture on Stellar Evolution, what Dr. D called our first “curiosity lecture,” meaning we wouldn’t use it for our final asteroid project. He hinted at some upcoming relativity and quantum lectures, which I’m really looking forward to.
After lecture we had our lunch break in the cafeteria. Most of Astro II sat together and we talked about what our schools are like back home. It’s a 10 minute walk between the cafeteria and the PSet room, so lunch always goes by way too fast.
We headed back to class for our lecture on MOG, or Method of Gauss (MOG sounds more fun). It was all very long math that I didn’t understand, but that’s a problem for when I have to do the PSet. I gave up on understanding the math pretty much on the second day, but my code still works (mostly).
After that we had dinner at the cafeteria. All the 4H kids who were dorming with us left, so the dining hall was just SSP people. Dmitri advertised his murder mystery game on Sunday, it sounds very intricate. He has put a concerning amount of work into this. I suspect he may be the true perpetrator of a real crime.
Then Jalen walked up to his table with his usual foot-long-tall tower of ice cream. I turned to the class, and said, “Now THIS is the experience of a lifetime.”
Everyone clapped.
Then, a Genomics participant invited us to a Euro Cup final viewing party on Sunday. I might go, but mostly for the food.
Today was Ms. Quick’s last day as our Site Director. Yesterday we all passed around a card to write our goodbyes to her, which we handed to her today. I had a little trouble figuring out what I wanted to put down but I think I wrote something genuine. I’m going to miss her a lot; a lot of the time she was the only person holding our program together. But we also welcomed our new Site Director, and she seems really nice.
After dinner we waited outside of the Bio Annex for the classroom to open at 7, and shared T-shirt designs until Dr. F and Dr. R saved us from the heat. In the meantime, Mateo had bird-whistled, which made a bird come out of a tree and crash into a closed library window.
It’s now almost 11 pm, and I’ve been in the PSet room since then. The work here is intense, especially for people who came into the program with no coding experience, but everyone here is really helpful, and helps whenever I get stuck. Thank you Pranet, Mateo, Taylor, Dillan, and Jalen. 🙏 Shout out to all my brothers in the struggle.
The first half of the program passed so quickly that next thing I know, it’ll be graduation day and we’ll all be ready to go back home. There’s a lot of people here that I’m going to miss, and it makes sense now why alumni come back years later as TA’s. SSP makes a really unique environment where we’re all struggling with the same workload and schedules. I’m going to miss the people here a lot.
On a separate note, I’ve learned that Marcus the TA is from Walnut Creek, Whackville.
Signing off from Astro 2, Las Cruces,
Angelo Chaca
