After lunch we returned to Herty to work, but not before we were treated to a lecture by one of our TAs, Ian. His presentation, titled ‘my talk’, was about how to give a presentation. He explained how to practice, how to stand, and how to talk. For example, he demonstrated how at the two extremes of the familiarity continuum there are ‘the mess’ – has no idea what they’re talking about, and ‘the TED talker’ – has practiced a million times and knows everything by heart. His advice was to stay in the middle – know what you’re talking about, but it shouldn’t be clear that everything has been memorized. At the end of his presentation, he split us into groups of 5 and gave us 10 minutes to create a part of a presentation on bees, and the best group would win the “#1 speech-giver award”. Unfortunately, as it turns out, having 35 students on a single google presentation while on a bad wifi network doesn’t go very well. Someone pasting the entire bee movie script certainly didn’t help either. As the presentation was essentially impossible to edit, and we had no motivation to work hard on the speech, we all goofed around. In the end, Ian gave the “#1 speech-giver award” to not only one group, but to all of us!

After Ian’s talk, we resumed working until dinner, and both the work time and dinner passed uneventfully. After dinner, we hung out downstairs in the common area we call the Hive. There, Sara discovered two things: one, that I was the only other person here who had heard of the grocery chain Albertsons, and two, that Albertsons is based out of Boise, Idaho. Unfortunately for her, this means that she can never step foot in one ever again. After this devastating blow, we started walking over to work at Herty. When we got to the front door, there was a small puddle that we needed to cross, so Olivia and Sai had to help Sara cross the puddle, or else she would surely trip and die. And now, here I am at Herty, procrastinating working on my report by writing this blog. Unfortunately, as I have now finished writing this blog, I now have no excuses left to procrastinate. 

-Pierre

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After some time had passed, the TA talk had commenced starting off strong with Evan. His presentation started off strong with thought provoking questions like why a man regretted his decision to glue glass pieces on a string, which was obviously because he was in a kite flying competition where it was illegal to do. Isa seemed to be the only one with common sense as she was the only one with the correct answer. We started off by going over several interesting and very real fish like the loch ness monster, the loveland frog and many more eventually ranking them. We did the same thing for other types of cryptic beings with interesting attributes/personalities. The talk ended with a task to create our own cryptic monsters, there were a lot of great ideas like the ominous Bathil, and THE Cube but Pierre’s creature, “the average programmer” prevailed victorious. 

The second TA talk was a little more content heavy where we learned about Maura’s research where she used the x-ray telescope to make observations on a potential black hole, but it ended off with a nice fun card game that I had never played before. At first I thought the card game made no sense, but after a few games I ended up enjoying it and even winning a few rounds. 

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, mostly consisting of working on the PSET as well as our final report. I’m genuinely content with all the work I’ve accomplished at this program and I’m excited to finish this report and wrap up all the hard work I’ve done into one final complete project. 

-Sahil

The post Astro GCSU: A Cryptic Day first appeared on SSP International.

Six days. Only six days of transformative, sleep-depriving, chaotic, bug-infested, and stressing-over-OD-week are left as I write this. While most people would be excited if a 5.5 week (I can’t believe that five weeks are already over) summer camp was ending, I think I speak for everyone here when I say that sadness is one of the many emotions flowing through my brain right now. I guess I should have expected that spending 20+ hours every day with the same people would create friendships that will last forever, but the camaraderie here is unlike anything else I have ever experienced. I constantly feel as if I have known my 35 fellow participants for years. And we can’t forget about the amazing faculty here that made this place a home away from home. Dr. Rengstorf and Dr. Andersen have done amazing jobs at teaching us everything we would ever need to know about asteroids and orbit determination, and Ms. Martinez has made our dorms feel as cozy as possible. And the four TA’s/RA’s (Benji, Joel, Kathryn, and Lara) have done a fantastic job balancing work and play, with occasional “mandatory fun” sessions a much needed break from the continuous stress of psets and coding. 

Anyways, the day started, as usual, with working in the now infamous “pset dungeon”, scrambling to finish all the tasks that OD week calls for. With finishing astrometry and photometry, formatting various reports, and writing countless lines of code, OD week truly lives up to its infamy. But with the endless generosity that everyone here has, everyone manages to complete the assignments on time. 

In the morning, we began the morning session with the first of four TA talks. A longstanding SSP tradition, the TAs talk for around an hour about any topic of their choosing. Lara, our first TA, chose to present on her path through college, and how she learned various things she did not expect to learn, including drama and theater. Her theater skills was put to the test with an impromptu presentation on slides made by us the night before (cue evil laughter). 

This was followed by a talk from Kathryn about how she made her own game with her sister during Covid, including a video of the world-record speedrun (3:43). Breaking for lunch, we got fake Chinese food, and watched many struggles ensue with chopsticks (multiple were broken). Returning, we had lectures on haptics and engineering from Joel and theoretical computing from Benji (apparently quantum computing is fake??!!?). Joel talked about spending three months studying how people hold their phones, and we had a fermi estimation contest during Benji’s talk.

Following dinner, we had a great karaoke night before submitting our MPC report, all nicely formatted and ready to send to the Minor Planet Center. Following this, we had the first pretty picture imaging session, and we are attempting to image the Crescent Nebula. 

Going off on another tangent here, but one of the many things SSP has given me is an opportunity to add to my on-going quotebook. Created during the school year, I was compelled to make a SSP quotebook, thanks to the countless random things being said 24/7 (literally it feels like we never sleep here). Here are some of my favorite quotes from this program so far (NMSU folks try and guess who said these )

• “i don’t think you are qualified to talk about this”
• “you look like a California surfer boy”
• “that seems like a disaster in fact”
• “can you eat pink eye?”
• “a guy killed his father once…it was kinda a comedy”
• “the bucket of mice distracted me”
• “i’m too white for this”
• “how long is two years in india?”
• “wait i thought stars were spiky”
• “if you approach problems this way then your mother will never love you”
• “you have my permission to slap him once”

And finally, my favorite and almost a catchphrase of this camp: “1…2…3…wrong indian!”. 

About me:

Hey guys! I’m Atharva, and I’m from Greenville, South Carolina. I love anything related to physics and am constantly watching random physics videos on Youtube. If I am not busy with taekwondo or school, I like to practice for upcoming quiz bowl tournaments, watch football, and listen to music (mostly country, pop or Bollywood). I also enjoy expanding my collection of keychains, magnets, pins, and coins. At SSP, you can find me grinding out psets, adding to my quotebook, or complaining about the dining hall food. 

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