June 25th, 2021
Well, the first week of SSP is concluding. I’m sure many of us are tired: thinking in ways most High School students wouldn’t think, staying up for hours doing work rather than play, and acclimating to a quick learning style that often leaves us not truly understanding everything that was thrown at us. We all knew what the program expected from us initially, but didn’t truly understand the work and effort needed to be put into the program. In the first few days of SSP, I was challenged in ways that I was never challenged before. It was somewhat of a euphoric feeling, but also extremely exhausting.
I have always been a planner: I update my iCloud calendar every week, have an extremely busy Notion, and have many alarms set in my phone for my activities. When I’m thrown off my routine, my day becomes disastrous. In the first few days of SSP, there were many times where I was making drastic changes to my initial schedule because I had a new layer of work to analyze, so I can understand the lecture the next day. Like others, I barely had any sleep and I was trying to wrap my head around new content while running on low energy. Discord, an application that I enjoyed, quickly became another aspect of the work I had to do. While I’m complaining a lot in this post, none of this reflects my true feelings about this week. I actually enjoyed this drastic change, it quickly turned my perspective around.
Learning how to adapt to change, and setting goals for myself was the most important part of my week. Embarrassingly, during my 10pm-1am Work-Play block I accidentally fell asleep around the midway mark in the block. I remember waking up at 3:00 am in the morning, feeling so stupid and disappointed in myself for falling asleep. Feeling stupid was something that I would encounter many times this week. From this experience, I tried out the split-night schedule that Dr. Kim was speaking about during our Learning Blocks. I found much better results with his new schedule, even though I wasn’t feeling quite as refreshed as I would hope to. However, it was a step in the right direction, which is always an important mindset to have when doing such intensive study.
The feeling of inadequacy plagued me many times this week. When I got lost in a lecture or couldn’t solve a pset question, I would be somewhat disappointed in myself. I also felt like I was behind in learning this material, as sometimes I wouldn’t fully get what a question was asking me. The python lectures especially were confusing to me, as my python skills were very beginner level compared to my other programming skills. I typically preferred to code in C#, C++, and C, since it was something that I was very comfortable with. However, this comfort in this previous syntax caused problems when adjusting to use python more extensively. In order to adapt, I tried to take deep dives within the references provided, doing practice questions on the code, and even tried to watch some videos to consolidate what I’m learning. I adapted to the problems, in order for me to succeed in the future. These doubts about my own abilities during the program have occurred many times, but coming to term with my own doubts was the hardest part. I had to
However, I think the biggest thing that I learned is that it’s okay to not be academically perfect. Through our many years of going through the education system, we are taught that perfection is what we strive for. We are supposed to aim for that 100 on the test, try to maintain Honor Roll, and get high standardized test scores. We weren’t learning for the enjoyment of learning, we were learning for the satisfaction of earning a letter/number on a page. SSP can be considered as an antithetical program, as they get a group of highly motivated students who always strive for perfection to be in a situation where they can’t strive for perfection at all. We are expected to switch our motivation and enjoyment towards the learning process, which can be considered a foreign concept to many of us. When I received my first Pset back, I was extremely happy because while I may not have completed all the questions or get them all correct. I did get to see that my explanations or thought processes were in the right direction, and that was enough for me to be pleased. It’s okay to not know everything, we are all human after all.
Now it is the end of this super long blog post. The final sentiment I want to express is take care of yourself. I surely haven’t been taking care of myself in the first few days, but I’ll definitely start. Instead of pulling an all-nighter just to perfect 1 question, take time to sleep. Taking care of yourself, fulfilling your basic needs will prove to be more beneficial to this program in the long run. This piece of advice came from the staff at CUB, and I truly love how much they care for us. During yesterday’s learning block, when Dr. Kim gave a message to us about how we should prioritize our health and well-being first. I really took that sentiment to heart. It was something I needed to hear after the long days of work I had before. A common universal phrase is that “the first step is always the hardest” and I agree with that completely. While this first week of SSP was really hard for all of us, if we keep a positive mindset and continue to take care of ourselves it can only go up from here.
-Mike
