It’s been a few days since I arrived at SSP and it is not really what I expected; there’s a lot more lecturing than I anticipated. Six hours a day can be very taxing and draining, but the support staff is amazing and I’m managing fine now. It was hard to really adjust to the program and accept the sacrifices that I had to make in order to be here and have this experience, but I know this summer will be one that will dramatically enhance my life. I’m putting a very long delay on my Olympic sailing campaign being here, and I already miss being on the water, but I know it’s worth it. The first days were rough and I struggled to engage in the lectures/psets, but today, things went well. M/P was mostly review today so my lack of sleep wasn’t too big of a deal. Astro was quite interesting and I really enjoyed the connections to optics which I had studied previously, but I didn’t derive many of the formulas. I’m getting into the swing of things now. A couple of days ago we walked to Etscorn. Around halfway into the walk, it started raining hard. We did see a double rainbow though! Etscorn itself was really cool. We got to go inside the telescope and see exactly what we were going to be working with for the next five weeks. It was relatively small but comfortable. The whole place was very isolated and had a nice tranquil feel. I liked just being out there with nothing around and being able to just look at the sky. I observe tomorrow (well technically in two days) during the late shift, really hoping the sky is clear! I’m really looking forward to figuring out how to interpret all the data I collect and how it works. I’ve seen pictures of what other people have observed and while it looks cool, I have no idea how to find the asteroids in question. I’m going to learn a lot in the next few weeks, and it’s gonna be a challenge, but it’s exciting! I’m really curious about what I am going to write on the last day for this blog.
