SSP was the only online program I have ever participated in that has felt meaningful. 

Often it is difficult to stay engaged on long Zoom calls. This was never the case during SSP. Whether we were designing plasmids, learning enzyme mechanics, or building models on MOE, I was always fascinated by the material, my peers, and most of all by the instructors. I vividly remember the day we learned about the FDA process for approving new drugs and vaccines. Although this was not directly related to the fungal inhibitor project I learned more about the vaccine development and approval process from Dr. Jill than I had in 14 months of reading about the topic in the newspaper. I was also amazed by how much I was able to learn about biochemical research and writing research papers from Dr. Martha. The helpful, if harsh, feedback provided by the professors made me a better writer and a better researcher. In addition, each step of the research project (yes, including writing the final report) felt meaningful, satisfying, and fun. 

Usually it is difficult to socialize on Zoom. This was not the case during SSP. Our TA’s worked hard from the first day to break any ice between participants through fun games and challenges. By the end of the first week, our campus already had its share of inside jokes and by the end of our second week, we were planning IRL meetups. As a side note, I will always be indebted to Matthew “Bungus Man” K. for bringing me a phone charger and finding me when I got lost during our meetup in Irvine. The friends I made through SSP are some of the nicest, most interesting individuals I have ever encountered.

This weekend I drove about 400 miles from SoCal to NorCal just to meet a few more in person. I can’t wait to see a few more at the alumni dinner this fall. 

Lastly, SSP was challenging, physically and mentally. There was a lot of material that I was completely unfamiliar with at the beginning of the program, but thanks to the professors, the TA’s and my fellow participants I felt as though I had a solid grasp of everything at the end. I spent the three hour break each day engrossed in a much needed nap; I’ve never slept deeper than I did after I had finally finished Dr. One’s labyrinth of pipetting. But what made it all worth it was the community. In other words, the real SSP was the friends we made along the way pranking the TA’s.

The post okay here we go first appeared on SSP International.

SSP 2021 is actually over… I’ve procrastinated many times during this program (whether it was starting the 8 pm lectures at 10 instead or correcting our group’s final figures the day before the paper was due), and this blog post is no different! It’s currently 2 days after I was supposed to turn this in, but better late than never!!

After a weekend of finishing our final paper and editing the many, many, many comments on our papers, we entered into the last SSP Zoom ever with all the IU participants along with the professors and TAs. We were first introduced to the SSP alumni network, heard some heartfelt thank you’s from the professors, and went into breakout rooms to thank the staff individually. I think the Paper Plate awards were a highlight of the meeting (Sid’s Excel Exceller was definitely one of the most accurate ones and Ellen’s Swim Champ mindset really encapsulated her talent show performance in Truth Hurts- link here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ODf1LThZIu-VGBPMVphWQjqB7GIpRksO/view?usp=sharing ). After the meeting ended, I felt super sentimental and reflective on such an amazing experience and I sobbed for a little while in my room afterwards.

I don’t think I can truly describe a month of crazy memories in a page on WordPress, but I’ll try to express my gratitude as well as possible. It’s actually crazy to think that a little over 30 days ago I was having a small mental breakdown about downloading MOE and organic chemistry worksheets and today I’m having a much larger mental breakdown that SSP is actually over. Whether it was singing lots of Taylor Swift with Group 5 (no more slander @ Jack, sorry you had to hear us sing @ Sid), rapping about random words with the TAs, trying to answer scary Dr. Martha questions or attempting to pull an all-nighter with both the IU and Purdue campuses on the last day discussing some weird things about tests, I’m truly so thankful for each and every memory that has been made. 

I couldn’t be more thankful for all of the TAs, professors, or participants for pushing me out of my comfort zone everyday, and helping me grow as not only a student, but also a collaborator and person. I never thought I’d miss hearing mass Discord notifications every time I entered TA or Campus Block, hearing random rock music come from our breakout room, or recreating our homology model at 11 pm at night (don’t want to talk about it), but I guess it’s time to return to sanity. I think Dr. Martha put it best on the last day when she said “It was the fever dream of a lifetime.” Thanks for all the memories SSP- you’ll be missed and remembered forever!

Ayo, Natasha here! Probably sound a little too enthusiastic, given that this is the final blog post of the program!! :(((( 

To recap what happened today, we’d have to start in the early hours of the morning with the all-nighter. It began with karaoke in the main room, followed by attempting to intermingle with Purdue SSPers, which proved to be pretty challenging. I still met some interesting people and learned that I’m not as fast at typing as I thought I was. Next, we switched rooms and played some melodramatic trivia games on jackbox. I’m struggling to remember what happened immediately after, given that it was 1 am in the morning. Sometime later, most of IU gathered in one room and did some pretty sus stuff. A couple Purdue kids unfortunately decided to come in at this time and observe the chaos—I feel sorry they had to witness that.

At this point, a lot of us were feeling pretty sleepy. It was probably about 3 am CST (the superior time zone) at this point. We decided to watch some Netflix shows, during which a few of us (definitely not me) took naps. Then, we all stressed about AP exam scores – College Board decided to favor the west coast again and release their scores first while us CST kids waited in anguish. Finally, at nearly 6 am, scores were released and we all seemed to have done okay. After struggling to stay awake for another 30 minutes or so, I gave up and hopped off the call. After the all-nighter, I tried to get some sleep before the closing ceremony, which Alvina already covered. 

SSP was the most incredible experience, from the talent show to attempted all-nighter. I’ll miss working with my team—all the chaos with figuring out Excel and the recombinant plasmid, Jolyn’s coffee addiction, Andrew providing us with classical piano music in the background as we worked through class activity, me snacking on something literally every TA block. And thanks so much, Team Jokkmokk, for putting up with me overthinking everything as we scrambled to finish our report. I’ll miss yall <333

I’m already missing all the chaos. I’ll leave you with some more memorable screenshots 

The post The Last Day first appeared on SSP International.

From Kevin’s lecture covering doorknob engineering and fonts, to Helen’s love of lofi beats, the SSP community is distinctive, diverse, and dynamic (and maybe a little bit dysfunctional at times). If I could give prospective SSP applicants any piece of advice, I would say, get comfortable being uncomfortable. You will learn so much, but in order to do so, you have to ask questions and learn to be wrong sometimes. Having those uncomfortable moments is growth. I did, and it led me to have my best summer yet with the most amazing and unforgettable people anyone could ask for.

Although my experience at SSP is concluded by the publication of our research, it’s the small, mundane moments that brought me to this point. From talking with Steven and Izzy for three hours about everything from our irrational fear of birds to Glossier, and private messaging Coco on Zoom about how cool Dr. Jill is, to laughing at Alex’s excessive use of the word “anyhow” with Claire and Charis in TA block (although I’ve definitely one-upped him with my use of “any whomst”), SSP has been comprised of many little moments that have led me to some of the best and brightest moments I’ve experienced in a long time. I couldn’t be more grateful to have had this experience, and I hope you all get the same opportunity one day. 

The post A Super Sad Parting From The Educational Experience Of A Lifetime first appeared on SSP International.

“Bless you Ms. Latus. Bless you Ms. Latus. Bless you Ms. Latus. Bless you Ms. Latus”. Beautiful first words to kick off the day.

Now before I get into today’s Monday shenanigans I think it’s worth mentioning the day that comes before Monday: Sunday. Typically we don’t talk about Sunday in SSP because it is the one day that we have off. But this week was different, because Sunday night was the night our groups had to turn in our initial drafts of our report.

For a group that is composed of four djungelskog fanatics with a chronic case of procrastination, this meant all of us were freaking out about the reports and didn’t really do anything about it until two hours before the deadline. My entire Sunday night was filled with formatting issues on google docs, error bars on google sheets (nonexistent error bars, I should say), and ligand docking on MOE blowing up my laptop. We eventually finished, and moved our report into the submission folder at 11:59, only to find out that it was the wrong folder two minutes later. After submitting, I went to sleep, ready for a ‘normal’ next day of SSP, but since when was SSP ever normal? 

…

[Monday, 7/19]

…

After blessing Ms. Latus, we had the opportunity to have a college roundtable with our very own IU TA’s. Unfortunately we missed out on Saj’s insights, but the TAs that were present gave us some very helpful, and some other not so helpful advice.

The highlight of the discussion would probably be the question about dating, which was directed to a certain TA. 

As the roundtable came to an end, the late block was sent off to our class activity.

This class activity was meant to be a time for us to work on our python searches, ligand optimization, and talent show acts (more on that later), but remember what I said about the chronic procrastination? Burning out after about 30 minutes of productivity, about 12 of us ended up in a single breakout room examining the Lewis and Clark expedition of a trip that William has to take in order to get to his SAT testing center. The more you know about Canadians.

We then learned more about Iowa, the home state of three of our IU SSPers. I did not come into this program to think I would learn this much about Iowa. The main takeaways were that Rishabh basically lives on a farm and there is a big butter cow at the Iowa state fair. A whole cow made of butter.

At the beginning of the TA block, we were met with a surprise appearance by Dr. Jessica, who told us that the academic directors finished commenting on our initial drafts. Later in our breakout room, we opened our document to find a bit over a billion comments left on our paper by Dr. Oakley (she really cares about the quality of our work!!). The rest of the block mostly consisted of our group trying to figure out how to fix our paper and the occasional cat-prisoner insult for Saj. 

The next pressing issue for us was the SSP talent show. Although we’d known about this since before the program started, many of us didn’t prepare anything until today (like I said, chronic procrastination). So it was up to us to figure out an act in the middle of our class activity block and get it all recorded and sorted out by the next day. There were many acts being prepared, but I can only speak on the two that I was involved with. 

1. Closer

What was initially going to be a piano-violin duet by Charis and Claire quickly spiraled into a full on music video rendition of Closer by The Chainsmokers. The ensemble consisted of Charis on the piano, Claire on violin, Alor and Coco with visuals and as lyricists, and me on viola, vocals, and harmonica. Much of the day and night from this point onwards consisted of us trying to figure out how to play the music, learn the parts, and how to edit it all together.

2. TWICE

The second act started off as a joke, but here at SSP, anything can be reality. I had to learn the choreography to the chorus of What is Love by the kpop group TWICE. This was by far the hardest thing I’ve had to do in this program. 

After a couple hours of blood, sweat, and tears, we finally got our recordings in and ready to edit. The most notable aspect of the ‘performance’ that I should point out is the matching outfits:

After some editing we ended up a product that is 100% guaranteed to make us the next kpop sensation. We’ll thank SSP when we receive our grammy (or whatever award applies in this case). 

Anyways, it’s crazy to think that today was the second-to-last full day of SSP?!!!??! It’s been so much fun, and I am so excited for what we have planned for the next day and a half!!

The post Bless you Ms. Latus first appeared on SSP International.

Elijah: 

It’s currently 3AM, probably a situation we’re all familiar with.

All the lectures, surveys, and the some-times-confusing class activities are coming together. Now, time to grind to finish the research paper (and I’m procrastinating a little too much >.>). 

Pooling everything together and writing the research paper has led us to reflect upon our time together at SSP. At this point in time, we are as close as ever as a team, something we would’ve never guessed would occur, especially over zoom. The interactions that occur between me and my team happen as if we knew each other for a while. While perhaps a common reaction, SSP has shown me that passion can open so many possibilities of deep relationships in such a finite amount of time. 

I was also surprised to see how close we got with others throughout the program, despite the lack of time together as compared to the time spent in teams. Namely, we would pull pranks on the TAs together, such as the time when several groups in late block and I changed our virtual backgrounds to a photo of Andrew and then promptly inviting the host (only for TA Rachel to refuse to acknowledge it).

And yet… 

Five weeks ago, we first met our teams through a very awkward exchange, telling each other “fun facts” about ourselves. Shortly after, we sat through our very first class activity and were given the task with drawing organic lines and structures. 

A couple days later, we were making fun of Saj for putting her cat in cat jail, never letting Saj forget the fact that it happened throughout the program—teasing her through many rounds of gartic phone and several other things was nothing short of amusing.

Then suddenly, here we are on our last weekend of SSP, drafting our research papers. The countdown for the end of the program has begun. 

And honestly, it’s lowkey depressing.

All of us have gotten so close through learning the material and helping each other while we apply our knowledge in lecture quizzes, class activities, the lab notebooks, and of course, the random side conversations. Although we didn’t understand everything that was taught, meeting people from such diverse backgrounds, but with a similar passion for science is stimulating—it truly encourages us to learn purely out of curiosity. 

Being reminded by the faculty that the end date is fast approaching is hard to digest. To imagine that we will no longer be split into groups to work on the class activity together; that we will no longer tease the TAs for their chai lattes, for putting their cat jail, or for butchering names, amongst several other things; that we can no longer punish TA Devin and Saj by making them duet Closer; that we’ll no longer collectively state our hate for LabXChange; that we’ll never be in a group like this every again. I truly do not have enough words to express my feelings about SSP, for the growing feeling of nostalgia, for the lurking withdrawal symptoms waiting to occur, and naturally, a newfound passion in biochem.

On the bright side, we still have 4 days left together! 

Sanju:

The weeks went by fast, the days were as long as I could remember. This was true of Saturday, which usually is the day that I lay in bed and switch between three forms of entertainment (my phone, my laptop, and a book, occasionally), get frustrated, and then sleep and hope for an interesting dream! This Saturday, however, I accidentally woke up at 7:30 in the morning after sleeping at around 3:00 in the morning and just could not go back to sleep. I guess I was just too excited to get working on that final report, because the first thing I did was get on a doc called Group 1 Final Report, and what a riveting time that was. If I’m being honest, I also had the google docs of every other team open on my browser, and then quickly x-ed out if I saw them on the doc at the same time. 

We had a veryyy interesting campus block that is top secret, but let’s just say, the FBI were involved, and as a witness, I am not allowed to reveal any information until the trial is over. Taylor Swift also made an appearance, and for that reason, she will not be releasing any new music recently. WIth that, we were released into an eight hour ta block, where I spent most of my time watching John Whitney’s hands pipette solution of something into something. I was uhh, distracted, which I should not have been, because I needed to get that experimental procedures section done. I also was watching tiktok prior to joining the ta block, and I guess I had forgotten to turn it off, because while I was writing the ingredients of buffer solutions, I heard “yea yea oh ohhho oh” in the background incrementally every 10 seconds. Guess what song that is, haha, it’s obvious, right. 

I capped off the SSP portion of my day with a few games of Codenames, and played absolutely no role in helping my team win, which it did, multiple times. Lemme find the screenshot real quick, because even SSP has not taught me the importance of properly naming my files. 

Fig. 1. Screen Shot 2021-07-17 at 5.52.17 A.M. (a) I took this specifically because someone asked me whether I was doing the blog for today, and then proceeded to tell me that I had really good material. I realized I had taken no pictures because I had forgotten, and I did not want my blog to be a block of text, but this is the only picture I have of today so I think I might have to put in generic pictures from earlier days and lie and say that they were taken today. (b) I was on the blue team, so I could not advise the red team on this and I did not want to, but I need to say that they did not pick hotel. I repeat, they did not choose hotel. Wait, they might have, I don’t remember specifically. But, they had a very long discussion about whether hotel was the right answer even though, in my opinion, it is obvious. © I keep typing in parentheses c into Google Docs and it autocorrects to a c in a circle. (d) For my thirteenth birthday, my birthday present was the board game version of codenames and I thought it was too complicated and never learned how to play. 

Even though I didn’t really get into my overall feelings about SSP in the post, I find things like that hard to word, and I think Elijah captured it perfectly. I will say that I really <3 this program, even though I felt stupid every day. I realized that that is a feeling I genuinely like :). It challenged me and it exposed me to extremely intelligent humans. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend this summer in any other way. Except maybe, in in-person SSP. 

The post T-4 first appeared on SSP International.

“Alvina and Sid are the best teammates ever and I have never met anyone smarter, funnier, or cooler than them.”

Alright now that I got that quota out of the way…

If you’re looking to have a stroke and you’re reading this, you’re in the right place! Right where you belong. Today you’re going to hear about the unfiltered itinerary of the average early IU student, the chaos and masterpieces that result when IU kids join forces, and the scientific “results” that we obtained from BLAST this morning. While you’ve heard the wonderfully told, clever, wholesome stories from the other genius, incredibly talented SSP kids, today you will hear from Jack, one of the few students in the campus who can render Ms. Latus absolutely speechless and petrified.

 “Everytime you open your mouth, I fear what would happen if we were here in person” – Ms Latus, 2021.

There is nothing I can possibly say or do that can astonish my peers or the faculty even more.

I started off the day by waking up very early at 6:30, earlier than the worms. We started off class activity block by writing a couple of poems alliterating COVID-19. My group, Natasha, Micah, and I, spit out some fire bars, of which only Natasha’s was remotely related to the prompt at hand (along the lines of “Core own a wire us”). Not only was it related to the prompt, but it was clever and creative. 

Meanwhile from my compatriot Micah: 

I was hungry for food, I wanted lettuce, beans, tomato, I ate my fast food, Covid was created by deltaco. 

From me: 

Bill gates is our savior, he warned something like this would come later, he took my blood, and gave me Covid blood. 

We then delved into the wonderful world of BLAST. After a half hour debrief session with Dr. Jill, we learned that only Matthew was able to get similar searches against yeast for his substrates. We then adjusted the assignment to searching against all organisms (something that would actually occur in a research setting), but unfortunately for the Fusarium groups, Siddharth, Alvina, Micah, Maggie, Sai, and I, we ended up stuck in our genus, and we got nothing for other fungal pathogens. Micah began blasting music through his speaker, which frankly isn’t nothing new, but naturally we called in the absolutely chadded and goated Kevin Tan and tried inducting him into our cult with seizure inducing music and a “dance” so powerful that it exorcised Micah from the zoom meeting:

At this point “im scared, what is going on” can be applied to 90% of our interactions in the early block. The fact that I have multiple recordings of Aaron’s ASMR readings of famous American speeches and legislation scares me. Some cultish backgrounds as well:

After Micah crashed out of the meeting and after consulting the TAs and Dr. Jill again, our “results” were considered to be a finish to the assignment. We celebrated this Nobel-deserving find. Blasting rock and EDM, it was pancakes on the griddle as we “danced,” and by we, I mean not including me, Alvina, Siddharth, Sai, or Maggie (though the disease soon spread). Kevin got lost on his way back to the main room (only possible explanation as to why he would voluntarily come into our room again) and accidentally came into our breakout room during the national anthem, until Micah and I scared him off again as we “danced” to Astley with the other people in the room giving us the all too familiar deadpan stare. If none of anything I said made any logical sense whatsoever, that’s ok. I was actually there, and I’m still confused. 

After that productive session, we headed over to Kevin’s TA lecture about the art of design. It was here that the campus gave an impromptu introduction of Kevin. Within 20 seconds, we pulled out his linkedin, instagram, youtube, bio on the SSP website, his whitepages, his address, his credit card number, his social security number, his involvement in the fall of the USSR, his role in the Marvel multiverse…

We probably scared him more than impressed him. 

Welcome to the internet 

Have a look around…

The lecture itself though was quite fascinating, as we learned about some of the most significant factors to consider when it came to user-friendly creative designs, as well as Kevin’s disdain for orphans. “We don’t like orphan children” – Kevin, 2021 @Harvard

(just kidding, Kevin is literally an angel, too wholesome to roast).

You’ll notice that I took some advice from Kevin’s lecture about appealing, legible design and formatting and applied it here.

During TA block, we entered the meeting to witness Micah’s dance routine again, and reminisced Of Mallards and Germans, which admittedly sounds like a Faulkner novel, and we then proceeded to write our papers. After bopping to Taylor Swift with Alvina (still don’t understand the hype), we headed over to join the other groups for some CodeNames and that was the end of the day.

As a wise old Buddhist monk once told me in China, remember to cherish the simplicities and small things of life (roughly translated to sound nicer in English). Admittedly, he was intensely dehydrated and sweating, and he appeared to be under severe heat stroke. I might add that he was also quite belligerent, especially in the traffic. Honestly, I don’t even know if he was a monk, let alone Buddhist (he was old though). But that still holds true here. The little interactions throughout the day really add up and are a huge part of how much fun SSP has been and how much I’ve learned especially about the research process. The sighs or screams of relief when MOE finally cooperates, the moments when your data matches up with your MOE predictions, finally understanding why you’ve done everything that you have in week 3, the looks of terror on the faces of the TAs as they anticipate the rapidfire discord pings, and the stories we hear in TA block really do add up. SSP has made me excited each day for what’s up ahead, even if I know it’s going to be a long day of MOE where we may or may not have to redo our homology model. The community here is incredibly tight-knit; they also weren’t lying when they said this was going to be an educational experience of a lifetime. Alright that was a bit too much sentimental wholesomeness for my liking. Once again, if you’ve read this far, I apologize for the aneurysm I’ve caused you.

Oh and finally some dance moves from the unit himself: 

Farewell children,

Jack

The post What do you actually do at SSP I’m so confused” – one of my friends first appeared on SSP International.

“Yo yo yo yo”

We’re in the final stretch. I know this because today is the first day in which the faculty did not once force us to play a game—or even take a break. 

We started off the morning at 8am PST with a special guest lecture from Nobel Laureate Dr. Jim Allison and his wife Dr. Padmanee (Pam) Sharma. Dr. Allison spent the first half of the lecture talking about the discovery of Ipilimumab and the mechanisms by which anti-CTLA-4 and anti-PD-1 enable T-cells to attack cancerous tumor cells. Though his lecture was much more involved than his documentary “Jim Allison: Breakthrough,” I was surprisingly still able to follow along (unlike his Nobel Lecture, during which I pretty much got lost after the first minute). Dr. Sharma led the second half of the lecture, focusing more on the current questions in immune checkpoint therapy and the research into solving these problems. Notably, she talked about how a unique clinical trial process shed light on novel immunotherapy targets and inspired our curiosity for the future of immune checkpoint therapy research. 

Afterwards, I hopped on a call with Ms. Latus to help plan the SSP IU merch! We decided to offer 3 articles of clothing (t-shirts, hoodies, and long-sleeve shirts) in 4 colors (white, natural, light gray, and light blue). 

When I came up with the design last week, I was inspired by the Virgil Abloh x IKEA “Receipt” rug. I added all the research groups into the general section of the bill (I definitely did not intentionally make our team the most expensive group). The TA’s iconic items went into the groceries section. Devin’s Dolla, aptly valued at $1.00, will always be my favorite part of this design (shoutout to Charis for this idea). Helen seemed disappointed that her iconic Lo-Fi beats were free, but at least they were a positive contribution to society (unlike Saj’s prison industrial complex, #freesajscat). Finally, the senior faculty’s iconic items were in the drugstore section. Ultimately, the entire SSP shopping experience was PRICELESS. 

Afterwards, we spent most of Class Activity and TA Block finishing up our research project, with occasional visits from Sai variants. (This is a reference to Loki) These Sai variants made sure to address the entire group #UncancelSai #ForAllTimeAlways (see “A Very Sai-entific Day” ).

The day ended with an unboxing of my QOD prize. Following the spirit of the week 1 QOD prize (Matthew’s transparent puzzle), the week 2 prize was a completely white puzzle. Considering I cannot even solve a normal puzzle, I don’t know if I will ever get the courage (or boredom) to attempt this puzzle. But if I ever do finish it, at least I will be able to paint a custom puzzle

As the research paper deadline approaches (72 hours left), our sleep-deprivation becomes more and more apparent. Charis becomes more of a toddler, Claire actually makes mistakes, and I lose the ability to comprehend time zones. 

Anyhow, it is past my bedtime. 

I will end the blog how I started it—with the words of our beloved William:

“Peace peace peace peace.”

The post The End is in Sai-ght first appeared on SSP International.

Obligatory disclaimer: The jokes in the below post are just jokes, and shouldn’t be taken seriously! Also I covered some stuff from the 13th that I really didn’t want to miss.

Hello Everyone,

SSP is drawing to a close, which is definitely a bit sad :(. Plasmids were a pain, and MOE is distressing – but it was all still very fun.

Campus Block started out great. We were immediately split out into breakout rooms, and we happened to have Ms. Latus with us. In the spirit of democracy, we appointed ourselves to the Ms. Latus Senate; I myself was the Ms. Latus Senate Parliamentarian!

We then approved the Ms. Latus Supreme Court. Oops, we have packed it with all our TAs. I bravely searched for wigs to adorn our justices, along our Chief Justice, TA Kevin Tan.

Moving onto Thursday, we filmed our TA diss video in Campus Block. I know that TAs read our posts, so I can only give a sneak peek:

Then we started messing around with the ZOOM green screen filter, even though we didn’t have greenscreens:

We got better (some of these are from July 13th, but still):

But one thing that was interesting was when local IUer Claire affirmed and reaffirmed her glorious guess for a country: Baghdad.

There is little else to say, but I worry about the geographical awareness of SSPers. For more about how I feel about this issue without taking up more space, see “A Very Sai-entific Day,” which describes the sentiment, except I feel like Claire and Claire in this case is like Sai.

I will leave you with a dancing docked ligand video:

Signing off,

Alor

The post Court, Filters, Geography, Oh No! first appeared on SSP International.

By Rishabh S.

Today marked T minus 1 week ish till the end of SSP, and personally, it’s crazy to me how fast the weeks have flown by. We started off the fine Tuesday with Micah attempting to explain the game Codenames over his rapid firing Discord notifications. Honestly, my group had no idea how the game worked, so like pretty much everything else at SSP, we decided to figure it out as we went. After a few turns, (and Alor trying to bend the spymaster rules) we all got the hang of it and had a jolly fun time trying to make connections between random groups of words. 

During our class activity block, we had about 15 minutes to finish our Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Talks, which we were to present later in the block. My group hurriedly put our internet research onto slides and made a somewhat cohesive presentation on the cancer drugs Imatinib, Bosutinib, Ponatinib (Who decided to make these drugs so unpronounceable man). Quick shout out to Helen and Judy for carrying the MOE portions of the project. 

“Why was the mushroom invited to the party? Because he was a fun guy”- Alex Gu randomly in the middle of class activity. After all the groups had completed their wonderful presentations, my research group and I set plans for what we were going to during TA Block, and then we bid farewell for 3 hours.

During the break between Class Activity and TA, I spent some time sleeping, eating, and shooting some hoops with friends. Pretty solid evening.

Finally, late TA Block! The time when half asleep teenagers use their collective 5 brain cells to make things happen! Today, my group and I learned about X Ray Crystallography, which for some reason to me felt overly complicated, but at the end of the day it gets the protein imaged which is what matters.  

Finally, we ended the night with some Excel/Sheets work. We used data from previous, in person SSP years to determine the Kcat/Km value (essentially the higher this value, the better the substrate is for the enzyme) for possible phosphopeptide substrates for our enzyme. Honestly doing this assignment made me realize how far our spreadsheet skills had come over the course of the program. I feel like if we had done this assignment at the beginning of the program, the excel work could have taken hours, but today we were able to get it done in about 45 minutes.

This last week of SSP is going to be a real grind, but I think it’ll be a fun one. Crazy to think that a week from now we’ll have a completed paper and a month of stimulating biochem research and countless laughs behind us. 

The post Ih-ma-tuh-nuhb, Poh-na-tuh-nuhb and Bo-sa-tuh-nuhb first appeared on SSP International.

A little after the halfway point of the program, the early and late campuses were finally able to “cross fertilize”, as TA Devin so eloquently phrased it. Having just settled into the flow of the early schedule, the sudden switch was a bit disorienting. And without the usual chaotic nature of early Class Activity sessions, Judy and Maggie’s morning felt quite empty.

However, being a night owl has its definite perks as well. Asides from being able to sleep in, we were able to meet a whole new group of people who we had only previously seen during the short Campus Blocks. During today’s Class Activity, we were split into small groups of three where we combined introductions we had previously written in order to create a new paragraph summarizing the enzymatic functions of Cdc14. And then awaited judgement. 

Back in the main room with the entirety of the late campus block, we shared our paragraphs one group at a time and provided suggestions for each other. Among the many (constructive) critiques provided, the most common ones included the placement/inclusion of in-text citations, capitalization, and italicization. Although these remarks may seem miniscule, they helped us truly master the art of writing proper citations, and highlighted the extreme level of attention and detail required when writing a proper scientific report. 

TA block started off with yet another interesting warmup. This time, we were charged with digging up our favorite websites, some dating all the way back to our middle or elementary school days. Some of these websites (coolmathgames!) definitely brought back many old memories. 

After the quick warmup, we dived right into our work. We had three short hours to create a presentation about tyrosine kinase inhibitors and exploring first and second-generation drugs. Between trying to search the depths of the internet for weirdly specific questions and the ever-present challenge of utilizing MOE, the time flew by too quickly and we DEFINITELY got a lot of work done…

Of course, TAs Kevin and Saj provided us with plenty of entertainment along the way, including a country-guessing game with Saj’s hard-to-read globe, a meme showcase, an ever-appropriate Kevin Tan tribute, and a TA height reveal. (Spoiler: despite Kevin and Saj’s long, intimidating auras, they are only around 5’5)

Guest Lecture Time!

Today’s highlight was definitely the campus block which featured a presentation from periodic-table-singing Dr. Kayode K. Ojo, Research Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, specifically the Division of Allergy & Infectious Disease, at the University of Washington. He talked to us about the history and current state of malaria, and how he and his team at the Ojo lab discovered a way to inhibit the rampant human to mosquito transmission of the parasite. 

As a child growing up in Nigeria, Dr. Ojo fell sick with malaria 15 times. Luckily, he survived and is now basically a superhero. Other than in the cold, frigid depths of Antarctica, every country on Earth has once been targeted by malaria. Although malaria is a thing of the past for most of the SSPers in North America, it is still an extremely important and dire issue in Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Currently, there are two main forms of dealing with malaria: bed nets and artemisinin. Bed nets prevent mosquitoes from feasting on humans, however they have been difficult to implement in some regions due to economic and cultural reasons. Artemisinin, which is a compound derived from Chinese wormwood, is a quick and effective combatant of malaria. It is combined with other compounds (such as lumefantrine which helps artemisinin stay in the blood for longer) in artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) that is then delivered to those inflicted with malaria. These treatments have helped decline the infection and death rates of malaria substantially for the past few decades. However, despites these strides, over 220 million people are still infected annually, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, especially in very young children. Along with a growing resistance to ACT, Dr. Ojo decided to set his efforts on developing a new type of treatment for malaria that would focus on a different area of the endemic; preventing reproduction of the disease in mosquitoes. 

Malaria undergoes asexual reproduction in humans, which is what most drugs currently target. However, within the first 10-30 minutes after malaria is passed from human to mosquito, a male parasite will fertilize female parasites and begin sexual reproduction. If the fertilization doesn’t occur within this time frame, the parasite will not reproduce and die in the mosquito. Dr. Ojo discovered that by inhibiting cyclin dependent kinases (CDK) in the malaria parasite, he could prevent the signal transduction pathway that starts sexual reproduction. After testing various combinations of compounds, he successfully developed BKI, a drug that is cheap to produce, small enough to fit in the active site of CDK, and stable enough to stay in the bloodstream for long periods of time. In addition, initial trials with BKI showed no malaria present in mosquitoes that interacted with infected mice. However, Dr. Ojo and his lab are continuing to develop a solution to the adverse effects of BKI in humans. Once this problem is solved, this inhibitor could likely be of vital importance in resolving malaria outbreaks all over the world. 

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