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.

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.

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.

After a break for lunch, we had another lecture about the long term fate of the universe. It was admittedly depressing to discuss whether the universe would end with a crunch or a freeze, but also somewhat comforting to be working with timescales well beyond ten to the power of twenty years out.

Once our lectures were complete, it was time to start the week-long crunch to complete our Method of Gauss code, astrometry, photometry, and Minor Planet Center report. A great deal of us stayed in the computer lab past midnight working on our illusive MoG code.  While this may not sound like a whole lot of fun, much like our walk back to the dorms in the rain at 1:00 am, the support and laughter of a great group of people made every moment of it enjoyable.

I’m Sean, a rising senior from Long Island, New York. My primary academic interest is engineering, although I also enjoy physics and astronomy. In my free time I enjoy working out, playing tennis, and biking with friends.

The post The Beginning of the End first appeared on SSP International.

I take full advantage of the opportunity to sleep in on a Sunday morning, waking and going back to sleep maybe 3 times between 9 and 12 before I finally drag myself to lunch. The food here leaves much to be desired but it’s tolerable enough that I usually leave the table with a sizable stack of empty plates. 

Post-lunch, I head over to Nikhilesh’s room for a quick study session to at least feel productive. I marvel at how clean and organized their space is compared to the wreck that is my half of the dorm. After filling a page front and back chock-full of equations, derivatives, and mental math, I arrive at nothing and decide to give up as the study session devolves into a yap sesh. 

It’s somehow 4PM now, and we wander over to Garcia Hall for Lucien’s ‘last and final’ ping pong tournament. I ping and pong my way to the semifinals, squaring up against Charlie, the Brit who has been dominating the ping pong scene here in Las Cruces, ultimately losing. Charlie moves on to the finals where he fought bravely but stood no chance against AAD and ping pong master Dr. Le.

Dinner time rolls around, and with new tables, we realize Staś’ seating algorithm screwed up again as I found myself sitting with people I had sat with before, something he promised shouldn’t happen. My teammates and I walk back to the dorms after dinner to pick up snacks for our first joint Astro I-Astro II ‘mandatory fun’ movie night. Hidden Figures was playing, but being the nerds that we are, many of us were watching it for the third or fourth time. 

By the time the movie ends, it’s already 9pm and my workday is just starting. Our team corrects an astrometry report that had been deemed ‘sketchy’ and I finally finish the pset I had been mulling over earlier. Then it’s back to grinding the headache-inducing nightmare of code that is the Method of Gauss orbit determination. Even without the sleep deprivation, debugging it truly makes you question everything that has led up to this point. At long last, my iteration finally decides to work instead of nuking itself by trying to take the square root on a negative semi-major axis value that should definitely not be negative. Errors that were debugged in the process included: naming a variable the exact same thing as a constant, putting more division signs than necessary, and forgetting to comment out hard coded test cases. It’s truly a humbling process, 10/10 would recommend.

Then it’s back to the dorms where we head to bed instead of finishing the Hunger Games movies in the lobby because we’re sensible students who definitely prioritize our sleep. Waking up at noon didn’t really help going to sleep early, so I helped my roommate with a pset before putting on a podcast and falling asleep to it. 

SSP has been all that I’ve wished for it to be and so much more. There is no other group of people I would rather brave the 105 degree heat of New Mexico with than this cohort. The people here are some of the smartest I’ve ever met but also incredibly down to Earth and just as willing to work on psets as they are to join a sunset volleyball match or build lego sets together.

I’m Kevin, a rising senior from Illinois. I’m obviously a STEM kid but outside of that, I enjoy trying new foods, building lego, and watching Formula 1 among other things.

The post Sunday Fun-day (Until I had to debug my MoG code) first appeared on SSP International.

The lecture was on quantum mechanics, a subject that I’ve been interested in recently, and was given by Dr. Andersen. I was fascinated but also quite confused, a sentiment that was echoed by most people I talked to. After the lecture was lunch at the dining hall, and then Dhanush, Gio, and I decided to work on problem sets. After finishing all four questions on the physics problem set and even the first question of the astronomy problem set, we decided to head to the library, where we ate ramen and talked about physics and life. As we exited the building, we noticed that in New Mexico, all it took was 45 minutes for it to go from a clear sunny day to a dark and cloudy rainstorm.

After dinner, Joey, Eric, Hardev and I took a break from work and decided to make paper airplanes. We tested them from the second floor of Domenici Hall and then watched YouTube videos to improve our designs.

After working a bit more on physics, astronomy, and asteroid determination code, we left Domenici Hall at 11:00 PM, significantly earlier than normal. The fact that we are just over a week out from the end of SSP is surreal to me, and while it will be sad to see everyone go, I can’t wait for the memories that will be created in the next 10 days!

I’m Jason, and I’m a rising junior from Cincinnati, Ohio. My favorite subjects are math, physics, and chemistry. I also love riding my bike with friends, playing video games, and swimming.

The post Quantum Mechanics and Paper Airplanes first appeared on SSP International.

I woke up at 8:18 AM today, which was later than usual.. Hazed by the cold atmosphere in my room, I checked my phone, only to find out that I woke up 30 minutes later than usual. I jumped out of bed and woke up my roommate, Shreyas, who relies on me to be his alarm as he sleeps through his own(sometimes). With both of us waking up later than usual, I rushed out of the dorm and headed to the lobby, grabbing whatever granola bars were sitting there. On the way to lecture, I was still thinking about why my alarm had not gone off this morning. I kept checking my phone, knowing that my alarm was set at the right time, but I came to realize that my alarm was only set to weekdays.

Today’s lecture about Quantum Mechanics was very intriguing to say the least. Not having prior knowledge in quantum mechanics, there were physics concepts that tied in with it, so not all of the material was too complicated. Having to look at so many problems involving dot and cross products was hard to keep track of, especially when I keep having to write and erase everything that keeps changing on the board.

After the lecture ended, I was unexpectedly informed that there wasn’t an afternoon lecture because it’s Saturday, which I felt like I knew, but nevertheless, I was still zoned out. Despite feeling zoned out, I headed over to my dorm again, just to get my mind off the confusion that I was having about today. As I entered my dorm, my roommate was there unexpectedly, laying in his bed, fast asleep. Realizing how much time I have, I decided to take a quick nap as well, only to be disturbed by the chants and laughter of the genomics group playing soccer out in the courtyard. Regardless, I got some sleep which was fine by me.

After a long and painful nap, I headed over to Domenici to start on our official orbit determination code along with a problem set that’s due that night. I sat in the workroom for almost two hours, just to get stuck on a wrong negative value that had nothing to do with the math that I was typing in, but rather the parentheses that I was using for those formulas. As for the physics problem set, I was frustrated over the fact that I did the first problem twice, only to convert measurements in the wrong order.

Around 5:15PM, I headed over to dinner in which the weather changed unexpectedly. There was a lot of wind and the clouds were forming a spiral-like shape, which was very surprising considering the fact that it was very hot beforehand. Nevertheless, I was able to make it to the dining hall without getting caught in the wind. Dinner was the usual. Our table group talked about how far we’ve gotten in our coding problem sets and the amount of time we have left at SSP. We were all sharing our experiences at SSP and the wonderful memories each of us has made throughout the program. Regardless of how difficult a task, it was truly a great day to experience something different everyday throughout SSP.

My name is Mohammad, a rising senior from Virginia. I’m interested in Computer Programming and love studying areas in STEM including Calculus, Physics, and Statistics. Outside of those subjects, I play Football, Wrestling, and Track and Field.

The post An Unexpected Wake Up Call first appeared on SSP International.