Creator: Audrey T.
Time works strangely here at SSP. An hour of lab might stretch on for an eternity, but blink too fast and week three is over. It’s a real problem. I feel like I’ve known each participant for months — whose retirement plan is becoming a conductor, who’s memorized the entire US highway system, and who’s always calling their parents every night regardless of the time difference — but in reality it’s only been 20 days.
Here’s another weird time dilation. When I woke up today, I was 16 years old. By tonight, as I’m typing out this blog, I’m now seventeen.
Today, as the first day of the second half of SSP, has been a day of reflection. As the SSP college and career day, today has been a day of forward-looking. And as my seventeenth birthday, today has surpassed all expectations. We started out with standard group activities: indoor kickball, an intense dance-off, and telephone Pictionary. Afterwards, I received my first gift. Two of my close friends, Angela and Rachel, had bought me a gift from a local store. This wasn’t exactly a surprise as they were pretty bad at hiding their plans — the constant hiding of art supplies whenever I walked into the dorm room was a pretty big giveaway — but their gift was still really special.
This is Babel, by R.F. Kuang, my absolute favorite book. Most of SSP knows this fun fact already because of my compulsive need to recommend this book to anyone who even mentions the word reading, but my friends had also remembered my offhand comment about how this was the book I wanted to reread a hundred times and annotate every page. They decorated and folded sheet music as the cards because of the aesthetic of course (although Rachel insists it was because she didn’t have construction paper, only sheet music) but also because some of the best experiences we had together have been in the music practice room with our eyes closed, listening to Rachel and Ephraim’s piano and violin duets.
I also got the book Carbon Queen by Maia Weinstock, a guest speaker who will be giving a talk to us this Friday. Kai, my lab groupmate, bought it for me because our group is writing the speaker introduction this week. I’m really excited to (hopefully) finish her book before I meet her!
Then, it was lunch and our college round table. We met with Harvey Mudd and Caltech admissions officers who shared about their institutions and answered dozens of questions. At the end of the round table, Ms. Latus, the program’s site director, presented the Insomnia cookies she had bought for my birthday celebration. After singing happy birthday, we feasted.
I’m glad I got to choose my cookie first (double chocolate chip) because they disappeared fast!
We got some more free time in the dorms, and decided to make bracelets with some of the beads Abby had bought. As a huge Swiftie, she brought them for the trend of making and exchanging bracelets with Taylor Swift references at her concerts, but we quickly repurposed the beads.
My bracelets are on the hand second to the bottom of the photo. We each put care into the secret messages we were encoding in our bracelets. For example, the “trivial” bracelet on my wrist is short for “trivial PURsuit,” my lab group’s name which we chose to fit the board game theme and make a Purdue pun (and a C. Purpurea pun because that’s our fungus). Here’s a challenge: figure out what the “ub ub ub ub ub” bracelet means. Here’s a second challenge (difficulty: extreme): figure out why we all have apple bracelets. Whichever SSP participant can get both answers first with no help from anyone whose hand is in the photo above will get the dollar Nirbaan gave me for winning his blog competition.
For dinner, we listened to presentations from two participants, Evelyn and Nikhil, and their reflection on how the first half of SSP went for them. Then, we listened as Purdue professors Dr. Mark Hall (founding member of SSP biochem) and Dr. Christina Li (SSP alum) gave their own speeches. Dr. Li’s talk in particular stuck with me. She drew an interesting connection between her current research and SSP experience: working on difficult problems with smart people is fun. It seems cliche to call her talk inspiring, but that was exactly what it was — she showed us that research, with all its frustrations and hardships, could be fulfilling and maybe even fun. I think if I really got to work with people like the ones I’ve met at SSP my entire life, research could be pretty fun.
And tonight, after all the festivities, I was sitting in my friend’s dorm room completely uninvited when the clock struck 10pm, and I was officially 17. I was over 2,000 miles away from home and, for the first time, celebrating a birthday without my family. But I really didn’t have time to be sad or homesick, not when I immediately got four birthday wishes (courtesy Rachel, Kai, Abby, and Nikhil) and two birthday hugs.
Here’s my hypothesis for part of the time dilation: the reason I feel I know everyone so well is because of moments like these. I inevitably pick up on other people’s habits from the small moments we spend together. I caught myself saying “y’all” the other day the way my roommate says it and doodling in the margins of my notebook like one of my lab partners. And in the bigger moments — the late night conversations about books and college and our dreams and everything in between — I can’t help but feel I’ve found people I’d want to be around forever.
