Author: Kavish K.
College. AHHHHHHHHHH. So far, SSP has been a break from the looming threat of college applications. But today, we took a break from the PSets to return to the complicated conundrum of College and Career Day. In hindsight, it was actually quite a nice experience to speak to the Harvey Mudd and Caltech admissions officers in such a small group, compared to the usual chaos of a high school college fair. The Caltech admissions officer liked my shirt. Does that count for some brownie points?
Following the info sessions from both colleges, our TAs hosted a college Q&A panel, which was arguably one of the most entertaining things at SSP so far. The quote board speaks for itself:
My biggest takeaways from the Q&A were:
- Dining hall fish is really really not good
- Stanford’s dining hall is worse than NMSU’s!!?!?
- Lara was capable of befriending all 2000 Harvard students, as well as all the rats and cockroaches on the streets
- Toilets…? I’d rather not know what Benji was hinting at with that comment.
Following the panel, we had a surprise kahoot and trivia. Shoutout to Saahil and Sri, my amazing partners on team Bengamen, taking the win. Who knew that the combined height of Lara+Benji was exactly equal to the combined height of Joel+Kathryn?
For the trivia round, Gautam seemed to know the answer to every question, and sadly team Bengamen was dethroned. How was I supposed to remember what LASER stood for? Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation is such a mouthful.
Finally came time for the first formal dinner of the program, with the board of directors and CEO of SSP. After a quick round of ping pong in our suits, we headed over to the ballroom.
Other than being accused of using ChatGPT to write our guest speaker intro (which we didn’t!), the event was amazing. Hearing Richard Chuang casually talk about his experiences meeting celebrities was rather mind boggling, especially when he spoke about his annoying buddy Steve Jobs and living with Matt Damon.
His perspective on the workforce was so uniquely different from anyone else I had met, and sitting at his table for dinner allowed me to get to know him even better. Easily the most incredible part of the speech, however, was how Chuang’s inspiration came from none other than his SSP experience in 1974. Hearing his stories of breaking into the computer lab to learn programming were especially inspiring. I mean… I would never do that.
About me:
Hi, I’m Kavish, a rising senior from San Diego! When I’m not working on a research project, or running my nonprofit, you’ll find me practicing taekwondo, or with my robotics team. In my free time, I love solving Rubik’s cubes, doing origami, and listening to Bollywood music. At SSP, I’m Pythoning, PSeting, and ping ponging.
