Author: Saahil S.
Today marked the beginning of our third academic week at SSP! It has been going a lot faster than expected, especially last week, being split up by our all day field trip. The work is starting to get more difficult, yet Psets seem to be taking less and less time each day thanks to mainly the help of the amazing peers and faculty we have access to here.
Benji’s “animal” look alike
Waking up every morning is definitely tiring thanks to the late hours we have here but Dr. Andersen quickly wakes us up with his somewhat dumb but hilariously delivered jokes sprinkled in the normal math or physics.
Lecture with Dr. Andersen
Unfortunately, what would have been a pretty routine day of lecture and Pset time was disrupted by a small outbreak of Pink eye among the participants. It isn’t all bad for them though, since they do get upgraded TA rooms for a couple of days.
Working slowly towards our end goal of making the asteroid orbit determination code has been even more fascinating than I expected it to be. My team (Ilana and Theodor) has been excellent, and we have diverse talents that are going to make this project a breeze (not really). It was really exciting to see our asteroid on the screen for the first time, and tonight will hopefully be our third. Sadly, our second set of data disappeared into the internet void for unknown reasons but the academic directors have planned plenty of observing sessions for redundancy so it’ll still work out fine.
The two participants that seemed to have symptoms had to go to urgent care on Sunday, and now they have been quarantined into admittedly much nicer rooms. We’ve been having to wipe down all the desks and chairs and other surfaces with clorox wipes to try and prevent the spread of the pretty contagious virus. Hopefully, it hasn’t spread too far and everything will soon be back to normal.
In other news, we have been preparing (not that much) for the 4th of July coming up. We had our final day of Dr. R allowing music to be played on the classroom speakers yesterday which was cool. Tomorrow we are going to be watching the NMSU fireworks show which will be a new experience for the staff too, as this is SSP’s first time on this campus.
About me:
Hello! My name is Saahil, and I’m from Orange County, California. In my free time, I like to design and 3D print new products for my store and take pictures of nebulae and galaxies from my backyard. At SSP, I’m usually asking people for help with math or messing way too much with my data.
