Author: Aaron Z.
SSP has truly been a special experience for me thus far. Besides utterly destroying my sleep schedule (I like to go to bed before 11 and wake up at 8), it’s been surprisingly rewarding. There’s nothing like the feeling of struggling over a pset problem with your team for over an hour during the work/play block and then a TA or another participant pops into your breakout room and says you could’ve done “this” instead.
Anyways, the morning began with the social hour began with Ms. Martinez talking about our upcoming talent show. She needed some volunteers to introduce the performers. Katrina, still on her quest to gain co-host privileges after yesterday’s fiasco, was willing to volunteer if she received co-host powers. If you haven’t read Gerry’s blog post here’s a quick synopsis: one of the participants somehow gained a co-host and changed peoples’ names on Zoom. However, they changed their own name to Abby, one of our TAs, in order to frame her. It was quite a chaotic w/p block yesterday.
Our social block activity was an escape room with another partner. And…. what do you know, I was paired with one of my fellow OD teammates Justin! We managed to finish in record time … is what I would like to say. We actually did finish though and we could’ve been first to escape if I hadn’t had a brainfart on the last step, which was to type in “ONENESS” into the keyboard. I was typing in “ONESNESS.” Thus, Justin and I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out what I did wrong.
After a short break, it was time for the guest lecture, which I was pretty excited about, as Mr. Aguera y Arcas was going to be talking about neuroscience and AI. Mr. Aguera y Arcas’s resume was extremely impressive, having designed software used by Google, Microsoft and Bing. I won’t go too much into his talk, but Mr. Aguera y Arcas discussed the human traits of being individual, empathetic and eusocial, and rectums. Now, you might think rectums have nothing to do with neuroscience, but Mr. Aguera y Arcas was talking about a colonoscopy study in which unpleasantness of an experience was tested with prolonged, but diminishing over time pain and instant pain. Kind of like ripping a band-aid off vs. peeling it off slowly. Surprisingly, those who had the “band-aid” peeled off viewed the colonoscopy as a more pleasant experience.
“So I have to pretend to be a human?”
-Dr. R, 7/7/2021
Next was our second OD session with Dr. A. Another two hours of confusion. I tried to listen to what Dr. A was saying, but at a certain point, it was going in one ear and coming out the other. I’m sure other NMT SSPers can relate. Can’t wait for when this is on our next math/physics pset. Also, somehow we ventured onto the topic of rats and kissing during the OD session:
Finally, time for w/p block. The LSPR code wasn’t as challenging as I thought. After getting started, the rest was relatively straight forward. At 9:00pm, Dr. R called everyone in for an Ask Me Anything session. We asked him a plethora of questions and got some interesting answers. Here was a picture Dr. R showed us of himself in high school:
When you get to talk about sleep deprivation, Python, misspelling words, and rectums in your summary of the day, you know that your day has been productive. Anyways, thanks for reading my blog post!
About the Author: Hey! My name is Aaron, and I’m a rising senior from Manhasset, New York. Some things I enjoy include gaming (Hearthstone, Valorant), swimming, and ultimate frisbee. I also like to play with my dog, Happy, who just turned a year old.
