The post link to CUB 2024 Blog Posts first appeared on SSP International.

Ms. Bana said something along these lines the first week of the program, “Can you think of 5 nobel prize winners? The 5 richest people in the world? What about 5 Golden Glove winners? 5 Academy Award winners? It isn’t easy. Now, can you think of 5 friends? 5 teachers that have helped you? 5 people you enjoy being around? See, awards, achievements, and accomplishments are forgetten, buried with your grave. The people that make an impact on your life are not those with the greatest rewards or merits, it is those who care the most.” 

I bring up this anecdote because its truth has been displayed all throughout my time at SSP. Regardless of your background, whether you are the #1 student in Turkey, someone who images blackholes, or a SoundCloud rapper from Chicago, each and every one of you guys has provided me memories I will always cherish and remember. The time I have spent with you guys has forever changed my life, and I look forward to the spectacular things that your future brings. Thank you for everything SSP. 

I also made you guys a video (Please watch it): 

Anyways, I hope the video I made makes up for the poor blog

Hi everyone! Today, we all woke up and slithered to SBO to write donor cards and fill out the exit surveys. Afterwards, all the teams finalized their stickers and cleaned up Kitt and SBO. Despite it being the last day, everyone still had a smile on their face.

After procrastinating my packing, we all decided to go eat our last lunch at C4C (the photo below was taken by a stranger because Kara could not figure out the angle to take a selfie).

After eating lunch, we went on a Zoom call with the NMSU campus and saw Laurissa and Laura 2.0. We asked some questions and then played a game where we tried to find a look-a-like from the other campus. 

The Zoom call ended and we went to change and prepare for the group photos. Everybody was looking straight beautiful for the photos. Despite the cloudy sky and the turbulent winds, everyone still had a fantastic time taking pictures with each other.

We had our 2nd to last count off before going to our last dinner at C4C. At dinner, Uluc got everybody to eat a final lemon. After dinner, we went to listen to our guest speaker, Dr. Karen Morrison, talk about life advice as well as her career. Although a short presentation, her advice and words were very impactful.

After the guest speaker, we had our paper plate awards. There was some disagreement about my awarding of the “Most Rizz” Paper Plate, but they are haters. Below I have pictures of some of my favorite awards (Honorable Mentions: Best Adlibs, Most Photogenic, Most Likely to Be a Successful Rapper). We then transitioned to our talent show, where we learned about receding hairlines and embraced slam poetry.

Following the talent show, we went to iHOP and stayed up late since it was the last day. Since there was no curfew, most of us decided to stay up late singing and dancing to early 2016 songs and Bruno Mars. Everyone was having a great last night talking and spending time with each other, except Joshua. Joshua spent his night as a barista and serving free coffee.

The next morning, it was very sad since everyone was leaving. Everyone was also incredibly exhausted since most people pulled all nighters. There were a lot of tears shed during graduation, and we had the opportunity to meet some of the parents. We said our final goodbyes to the people that had their parents pick them up while the rest of us took a bus to the airport. After bag check-in and security check, we met up at Terminal B to eat lunch at Shake Shack. After saying my final goodbyes to everyone, I boarded and fell asleep for the entire duration of my flight.

Aaron

SSP 2023 CUB QoD Winner

SSP 2023 Most Rizz Paper Plate Award

My name is Aaron, and I go to Stephen F. Austin High School in Sugar Land, Texas. I enjoy playing sports such as basketball and volleyball with my friends as well as the violin. SSP has inspired to keep on shooting for the stars, and I will forever cherish the community we have built.

The post Only Memories, No Regrets first appeared on SSP International.

After not seeing Interstellar for many years, I was able to enjoy it in all its glory. I especially appreciated ALL of the physical accuracies that the producers took into consideration (the bookshelf scene in particular). Following the movie I went down to the basement to play some ping pong before returning to the common room only to see some of my friends practicing their act for the upcoming talent show. We then somehow roped Diego into bringing down his laptop to the common room and setting up an impromptu Karaoke night! With more and more people coming to join us, we sang song after song all night long (until curfew). Following this, I no longer had a functioning voice due to the immense passion with which I sang Taylor Swift. It was the perfect conclusion to the perfect day, and I know that I will greatly miss the people at SSP for years to come. 

Hi, my name is David and I am a rising senior at Eaglecrest High Schoolwid in Aurora, Colorado. I love tennis, spending time with friends and I hope to pursue physics in college. I loved being able to work with like minded people and expand my knowledge of astrophysics at a place like SSP. Although I am sad that the program is coming to an end, I would not change a thing about how the program went. Thank you all for an amazing summer!

The post SWRI or T-Swift? first appeared on SSP International.

My day began at 12AM after observations. My group had already finished our report on Friday, so we were using the telescopes to take pretty pictures and look at cool objects in the sky. Here’s a processed photo of the ring nebula that I created. 

The observation was the middle shift which is 5:00 to 6:00 UTC. Afterwards I came downstairs and hung out for a while with Rebecca, Aaron, and Dominick in the lab. I think we were answering Science Olympiad questions. 

(Left to right: Dominick, Rebecca, Aaron, and Me) 

My day began again when I woke up at around 10am to play tennis and practice my serves. Later on, we had a lecture (which was an abnormality- usually we don’t have lectures on Sunday, but since it is nearing the end, I don’t think there was anymore extra time). 

At 1pm the lecture began. Guest speakers from the SouthWest Research Institute came to help us program the orbit of our asteroid around 50 million years into the future. Team 2 Feynmints’s asteroid (1627 Ivar) mostly ejected out of the solar system but also had three clones (simulations) that hit into the Earth. But don’t fret, that’s like 3/60 chance and only 12 million years into the future.

The speakers from the SouthWest Research Institute also went over some concepts of chaos in our solar system and in the asteroid’s orbit which was super interesting to learn and talk about. They compared it to a double pendulum, where eventually if you have three begin moving at the same time from the same position, they eventually begin to diverge. I really found the unpredictability of the solar system incredible. 

Here’s an image that showcases the potential orbits of our asteroid!! 

(1627 Ivar – coolest asteroid) 

After that we had dinner! It was the last day with my assigned dinner group which was Ms. Bana, Lana, Ben, Leo, and David. Unfortunately I don’t have a photo of us sitting together for dinner. 

My next table is with Laura (one of our TA’s) so I’m really excited. I think the assigned dinner has helped connect more with the staff and other SSPers which I’m really grateful for. 

Next after dinner, we had to finish up our data processing and I also processed some of the images we took from observation. The servers crashed so we left and watched Mean Girls as a group! (Unofficially until the servers were fixed). My work was pretty much finished anyways, I just had to go back to let the program run overnight. 

Later on, we practiced for the Talent Show!! 

Here’s everyone practicing! We won some kazoos from the arcade (field trip) and we’re using them to play in the Talent Show.

(From left to right: Jay, Ben, Cam, Rebecca, Christina, Me, and Marcus. Not pictured is Joshua, who took the image) 

My day ended with going to SBO to let my code run overnight, and then going back to the dorms and talking with my roommate Lillian. 

I’m going to miss SSP and am sad that it’s ending so soon (the weeks have flown by). I am truly grateful and want to thank everyone that helped make this experience so great. To the TA’s for being there to help us and guide us. To the professors that lectured, guided and helped us. To the staff that put this all together. To the guest speakers that came and spoke to us about their lives, careers, and research. To my team, the Feynmints for our collaboration and work put into programming, observing and PSETs. And finally, to all the people and friends I met at SSP, thank you for being there! 

I hope you enjoyed my blog! If you’re thinking about applying to SSP, you totally should! The experience is amazing and you learn something new everyday. 

Hey! My name’s Natalia and I’m from New York. I enjoy reading, playing tennis, and trying new things. I hope to study something in STEM, probably engineering (and possibly a minor in computer science).

The post (Almost) The End  first appeared on SSP International.

Afterwards, Viktor and I joined (almost) everyone else on a mini field trip to the Hill. We first stopped by Walgreens where I bought a very reasonably priced CUB T-shirt. We then went to Starbucks and bought some less reasonably priced coffees. For lunch, Viktor and I ate at a restaurant recommended by our TA Laura. The food was tasty but the “medium” spice chicken curry I ordered almost made me pass out.

After our trip to the Hill, it was time for Dr. D’s Wizard Show. Before the show even started, we were already all mesmerized by Dr. D’s gigantic rotating wall.

The rest of the show did not disappoint. The wall was followed by lighting hydrogen balloons on fire, playing with a Tesla coil, launching a globe from a tube and smoke from a box, surprising interactions between a strobe light and a spinning fan, and showcasing an instrument called a Theremin (which upon further Googling, I learned that it directly led to the development of the synthesiser). 

Dr. D and Tesla coil

After the show, we were given a tour of the physics building which, save for the 10 stories we had to walk up, was fun. The view was worth it.

Part of the view

I proceeded to have a delightful dinner. After dinner, Andreas, Viktor, and I played soccer that could make Messi or Hazard jealous.

Wanting more exercise, Viktor and I proceeded to play ping pong with Leo, our resident economist.

My day concluded at 11:59:59 PM with our last observation shift at SSP. It was far less stressful than our previous shifts since we only wanted to take pretty pictures. Viktor and I enjoyed looking through the eyepiece. We saw the Lagoon Nebula, Ring Nebula, and Saturn + its rings!

It’s hard to believe that there are only 3 more full days at SSP after today

Hello. My name is William and I’m from Maryland. I enjoy drawing, watching soccer, and listening to music at reasonable volumes. SSP has been an incredible experience…I can’t believe it’ll be over so soon.

The post …And Then There Were Three… first appeared on SSP International.

The night before, my Monte Carlo simulation wasn’t working. Like I couldn’t believe that was happening because I really wanted it to work. But oh well! I woke up and went to breakfast. I planned to get breakfast with Leo, Elyse, Lillian, and Sophia (I like to call them the Cult because they seem to be near each other practically 24/7), but none of them showed up until 9:15! Lillian blamed Leo, which is probably deserved. Lillian’s burrito turned out to be… a flop. She was NOT very happy with it. 

The rest of the morning involved me debugging my simulation with help from the Cult, each minute making me wanna become a stats major less and less. Maybe I should become a park ranger instead, right Elyse? But there was a bright point of the morning, and it came when the T-shirt order got in! Youjia was extremely happy about it, though maybe she would’ve been even more excited if it was the right size. I got the same color as her (desert pink! Don’t let anyone tell you pink isn’t a fire color), and I’m sure I’ll wear the shirt for years to come – as long as I don’t lose it traveling back to Germany. 

Desert pink!

After that was lunchtime. The Cult and I joined Gustavo, who thinks I “look like a hippo” for some reason?, and Alyssa, another Canadian joining ranks with Leo to spy on our beloved country. After a while, the food at the C4C has gotten a bit bland, but still somewhat edible. 

The afternoon was not particularly eventful – there was a computer class that was taking over the computer lab from 12-3:30, though I did find sleepy Taizo and other people in Kitt while William and Viktor were outside the observatory. They showed me some Joe Biden memes, as expected from such a fun duo. 

Absolutely! 

Then I did some more work, including coding up the trajectory of the asteroid as an ellipse and the percent error of our elements, until dinner. Stephanie and I posed in our classic “Ben JAMMIN” stance, and dinner was short because everyone was eager to start work again before the deadline. Just look at Ming dashing to SBO! 

Rocking out with Stephanie!!

See ya Ming

Our team finished (shout out to Lana and Jovan for working super well with me as a team throughout the summer) and shortly after a rainy run to Kitt we went over to Dairy Queen. In fact, everyone finished! It’s a great group of people here, so I wasn’t surprised in the slightest. Good job yall! 

The mountains looked so pretty that day, as Leo and William surely believe. 

William Zhong, a truly bulbous boy.

Jay being a hater ?!

Before going into Dairy Queen, the Cult and I went to get sushi (which was, as one may expect from a grocery stores, exceedingly mid). Then in Dairy Queen, I got a Heath Blizzard which August copied – how dare he! I can’t believe it! OUTRAGEOUS! Anyways the staff paid for our ice cream, so Leo went out on a limb and got some Puppy Chow. Not completely sure if he was kidding or not, but for a little bit he had the impression that Puppy Chow was literally chow made of puppies, or that they were made for puppies (one is slightly worse than the other). Of course that makes no sense, since dogs can’t eat chocolate. Canadians truly are a strange people. Then again, we were all out of it after the whirlwind of finishing the final report. 

Finally at the end of the day was my favorite part: TA trivia. Questions ranged from Millenium Prize problems (somehow I remembered what they were) to the chakras of Naruto. Our team got second to last, but I’m just glad we tried and were a somewhat diverse group in backgrounds. Cam (Ich liebe dich!!) carried us for the anime, while Leo knew a tonnn of physics stuff. Shoutout to Sophia for her guess that liquid oxygen was blue. 

What in tarnation…

Afterwards everyone split up and got ready to bed, and I wanted to play Exploding Kittens with Emily and Goose. Then Dominick joined along with Richard and it turned into a talk about getting letters of rec from SSP (don’t worry: Richard was very discreet about what he said like the great TA he is. So so responsible!). 

I’d say roughly 80% of my showers happen at the same time Dominick has a shower (1 AM!!). So I said good night to him, went back to my dorm, and slept. A very eventful day, and surely one that I’ll miss when SSP ends next Wednesday.

Hi everyone, I’m Ben and I’m an American rising senior living in Germany! I’m a military kid, so I’ve been all over the world, but primarily in Texas, Nebraska, and Germany. I enjoy hiking, kayaking, playing and listening to music, and learning math (when I understand it!). 

The post Wait – Puppy Chow has Puppies in it?! first appeared on SSP International.

After lunch, we headed back to SBO to listen to Laurissa’s talk about the video game she created with her sister. The game was about a girl trying to rescue a princess from a dragon. We watched Laurissa play the game as she walked through the various stages and puzzles. I was enlightened by the linear algebra that you could use to solve the in game puzzles(this was my favorite part of the talk btw).

After Laurissa’s talk, I went back to the computer lab to do even more final OD report work before dinner. After dinner, I had another interesting session of OD report work. I continued to write up the report with my team. On a more important note, a hot topic of conversation during the night was William’s showering routine. Taizo and Cam were only two of the many people who were curious about his showering routine.

WZ Hong claims he averages a shower a day. “Absolutely”. We’ll leave it at that.

Hi everyone, my name is Jovan. I love learning about the most bizarre topics of astrophysics and enjoy basketball.

The post Gaming with Linear Algebra and WZ Hong first appeared on SSP International.

7:30 Even though we have no morning lecture today, my alarm still woke me up so I could get to work time nice and early.

8:10 Now that I had showered, gotten dressed, and maybe watched a YouTube video, it was time for breakfast.  I tried the omelet bar for the first time and even though it had been highly recommended my omelet ended up taking forever and ended up dry and disgusting.  Luckily the view from the outdoor seating made up for it even though my early wake up time meant that my only company was the distant mountains.

8:45 Ahhhh home sweet home, the computer lab.  I was the second person in, right behind Uluc, guess no one else decided to sacrifice sleep for a little extra work time, though by our usual 9:00 lecture time 25% of SSP had made it in!

11:40 Lunch time!!!!!!  Since we didn’t have a morning lecture, we got to pick our own lunch time, so me, Lana, Youja, and Cam all decided to eat at 11:40 and sat outside together.

(Cameron can’t even stop eating for a photo)

12:30 Because we had some extra time after lunch, all four of us decided to go listen to Youja practice her flute for the talent show.

(Can’t refuse a FREE concert, even if the flutist was laughing throughout it)

1:15 Our TA Laura gave an amazing talk on her journey into quantum mechanics and told us how Alice in Wonderland and Bob the Builder could communicate by q-bit!

3:10 The talk was over but the computer lab still had a class occupying it, luckily our site director Ms. Bana saved the day with an announcement of Alyssa’s birthday!!  After singing her happy birthday we all went outside and ate cookies to celebrate.

     (A very enthusiastic birthday girl)                  (Emily didn’t want to be left out of the blog)

3:30 At this point the class had all cleared out so we got right to work, continuing to code our final orbit determination programs.

4:45 My brain was thoroughly scrambled so I left a little early so I could relax a little for lunch.

5:30 Almost all of us made it on time for pre-dinner announcements which as usual contained calls for overdue blogs (hopefully this one won’t join those).

5:45 With a plate full of persian food and grapes, I joined table 2’s conversations about french horns, central Oregon, and astronomy inspired ice cream flavors!  

(A few of my favorite flavor ideas were: Hot Young Star (blue raspberry), The Rocky Road to a Dark Sky, Black Hole Chocolate (VERY dark chocolate), Meat-e-ors (maple bacon), The Milky Way (sweet cream), and Star Clusters (chocolate clusters))

7:00 Time to get back to coding…  While some of us had really good luck with our code, some codes took a lot of debugging, only to find it was a single negative, or a few decimals in the wrong place.  Just like any other coding night, there were shenanigans everywhere, including but not limited to, pictures of hairlines, curse counters, pride flags appearing in code, and muffled screams of unknown bugs.

(using simple subtraction and division we can figure out the rate of curses to be ~17 curse words per hour)

(guess Ben’s strangely formatted code decided to come out as non-binary)

Hi, I’m August and I go to George Washington High School (a really unique name).  I love space, rockets, art, crochet, teaching, being a part of the best team ever: Freeze Dried Apple Worms, being awesome, and of course, being a big nerd.  (I also like watching YouTube but that’s not quite as cool as space)

The post Birthday Cookies and Black Hole Chocolate first appeared on SSP International.

    The next part of my day started when I woke up at 8:50am and ran to SBO for what would usually be a morning lecture.

     Instead of the morning lecture, we had presentations from our amazing TA’s, Richard and Diego. Richard gave us a presentation on the first picture of a black hole that he helped produce as part of the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration. My favorite part was hearing about the eight radio telescope observatories that worked together to create the absolutely bulbous image of the M87 black hole. 

     Just when it seemed that Richard’s presentation couldn’t be outdone, Diego managed to prove me wrong. Diego taught us how to become rappers and he started by having us come up with our rapper names. According to Diego, the key to a great rapper name is having “Lamar” in it. Armed with this knowledge, my group, headed by WZ Hong came up with the brilliant name “Jane Lamar Street”, in honor of Richard’s transition into Quant. We then moved on to learning the proper rapper “lingo”. Needless to say, after the lecture William and I utilized our expanded lexicon and pulled up in the benzo to C4C, frosted flakes all on our wrists, and ready to cop all the food in the cafeteria. 

     After dinner it was time to continue our work on the Final OD code. However, any productivity we had went out the window when William decided to prove that he was 5’7.

Hi everyone! My name is Viktor and I’m from Bensenville, Illinois. I love plane spotting and I am planning to study Aerospace Engineering in college.

The post Straight Heat first appeared on SSP International.

Today marks the start of the last full week of the Summer Science Program. At this point in the program, lectures turn from deriving the endless steps necessary for our Orbital Determination code to totally cool stuff! (not that math and physics aren’t cool.. I love them as well!!!) Dr. D decided to tell us about his experience as the physicist who investigated the FedEx Express Flight 1478 crash of 2002. I have never learned about airplanes before, so I found it crazy to understand the optics behind the PAPI landing system. 

The green and blue in this image are actually the same color! But the surrounding colors affect your ability to perceive them. Its relativity to the colors around it is how pilots can mistake the red and white landing signals and end up descending too quickly. This plane turns out to have carried some of the deciding Florida ballots of the 2000 Bush Al Gore election which burst into flames… 

In the second half of the morning, Dr. D told us about his childhood and career journey. He also recommended us a variety of physics, astronomy, and sci-fi books to read throughout our undergraduate years. I hope to read as many of them as I can in the future

I’ve been thinking a lot about what to study in college, but don’t worry, after reading this chart, I think I’m going to major in psychology. I just can’t decide between clinical psychology, organization psychology, educational psychology, or miscellaneous psychology. I know, they all seem to lead to great careers.

Our lunch conversations always make me laugh so hard to the point where it takes an hour for us to finish eating, but that’s just a part of what makes SSP special. We are also particularly productive during this time period (we completed maybe a quarter of a problem). 

In the afternoon, we had a guest speaker, J.B. Tarter, who works in the US Department of Energy for the government and is an SSP ‘01 alum. He happens to be really close with Josh Gottlieb, one of our previous guest speakers at CUB who  always mentions their friendship, of course. 

He talked a lot about how most of us won’t become astrophysicists, yet there are endless other possibilities and experiences waiting for us if we seek them. I took away that SSP connections will follow you everywhere, for the rest of your life, even when you least expect it. 

I’m so thankful to be a part of SSP, the most dedicated and supportive community I’ve ever been in. We’re already 82% of the way to being alums, but it feels as if the memories from the first week are still so vivid. Back then, I couldn’t even imagine the workload ahead or what the end of the program would feel like. Somehow, amidst the hardest work I’ve ever done and the latest I’ve ever gone to bed, I’ve been having the best experience of my life. 

Hey everyone! My name is Lillian and I’m from Belmont, Massachusetts. I love rowing and trying new foods and I hope to study physics or engineering in college! It’s hard to believe that our time here is really coming to an end, so for now, I’m just going to savor every moment of our last week together.

The post The Physics of the 2000 Bush Al Gore Election first appeared on SSP International.