After a solid six hours of sleep (probably the best sleep of the week so far) I woke up at 6:45 and got ready for my morning run. I enjoy running in the beautiful North Carolina morning weather to get the day started. After our run on the soccer field, we went to breakfast and then got ready for class.
For the morning lecture, we learned about astrometry and started crafting code on Python to find the centroid of our asteroid. We then took the 15 minute trek to Chase Dining Hall to eat lunch. After lunch, since the weather was finally clear after days of raining, we decided to play some Spikeball, which has become a favorite activity among participants at UNC.
In the afternoon lecture we proved some physics equations that we will be able to use in the future. We then played some more spikeball and got ready for dinner.
However, the rain came back, and just as everyone was about to walk to dinner, we heard the loud thunder and got a notification on our phones of a flash flood warning. We were told to stay in our dorms, so we took this opportunity to play Mario Kart and Wii Sports in the lounge with the newly acquired Wii. Though we were all very hungry, we soon got great news that we were having a pizza party! As the rain started to slow down, we all walked to Phillips Hall and ate pizza, a nice break from the Chase Dining Hall food, which tastes decent but is very repetitive. The weather started clearing up, and we were all ahead on our Psets so we were able to play soccer at night, which was a very fun experience in the dark.
Some takeaways from my first two weeks at SSP:
-Unc is a fun campus with lots to explore
-Everyone here wants to help and will never let you get behind
-I have absorbed more information than I ever thought was possible in two weeks
Overall, the challenging Psets and lectures of SSP have helped us bond and create a strong community in just two weeks, and even though we work almost ten hours a day, there is still plenty of time for fun activities outside of the classroom.
Hello! My name is Jackson and I go to Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale, FL. In my free time, you can find me running, playing tennis, or watching sports. I have always been interested in outer space and am greatly appreciative of the excellent opportunity I have at SSP.
