A New Outlook on Physics

7:50 a.m.: I wake up with a start. Must have forgot to set my alarm…I dress quickly and head off to breakfast. It’s almost 90 degrees already… the sun rose a lot earlier than I did.

8:35: breakfast time is almost over! I head over to the classroom a bit early, since my team’s on classroom clean-up duty.

9:00: The room is hyped for Dr. Le’s first lecture! After 3 hours of physics, ranging from black holes and gamma ray bursts to the behavior of light and spectroscopy, class ends with thunderous applause. You can’t deny this groups’s enthusiasm for physics. 

12:00 pm: It’s lunchtime now, but after a lecture like that, our lunch break sneaks up on us!

1:00 pm: Back to the classroom – this time with Dr. Rengstorf! After such an enlightening discussion of light (get it?), it’s time to learn how telescopes and cameras collect, analyze, and display it! We get familiar with our local telescope, at Tortugas Mountain Observatory, and its inner workings. 

4:00 pm: Time to work on p-sets. No-one can tell me SSP isn’t a grind… I work on my python programming until dinner.

5:30: Dinnertime! The pasta is delicious. 

7:00 pm: After dinner, it’s back to the computer lab! I struggle for a while (read: almost 2 hours) trying to blur an image a certain amount. I get some stripy images, some swirly images, some completely unchanged images, until… Eureka! I fix a bug, and it works. Now I’ve got time to work on my Astro p-set. 

11:20 pm: Eyelids drooping after a few nights of little sleep, I grudgingly admit I’ll need to finish the Astro pset tomorrow, and I head back to the dorm. I’m tired, but I’m glad I got that code working. Sometimes progress is slow, but it’s always happening. I roll into bed and await a new day of SSP.


Hi, I’m Rachel, and I’m from Southern California. I’m super excited to be out here at NMSU to pursue knowledge in one of my favorite areas of study: physics! I love Star Trek, sci-fi books, and D&D, and I’m grateful to be here among fellow STEM-nerds.