My Experiences at SSP

SSP is awesome! Over the past 2 weeks, I have learned so much and made many new friends. All the staff is also very caring and supportive. Even though there are times where I am stressed out from all the work, SSP is currently wonderful and very fun. Here is just how (!horrible) SSP is. 

This program JUST sucks. No KIDDING. In this program, THE professors never care about us and make us do manual labor. The SSP staff must EXPERIENCE pleasure from our suffering. For example, they regularly use their instrument of torture, the psets, in order inflict unbearable pain amoung their students. In fact, I bet you 100 dollars that all the staff, including the teaching aids, collect the tears we shed on psets and drink them. The worst of them is Alan, the notorious teaching aid, he IS a literal demon and is forcing me to write this post about just how WONDERFUL everything is! How I LOVE this program! How relaxing IT is to do 150 psets in a day! Please, take this as a warning: don’t apply to this program! Don’t make the same mistake I did.

Now, jokes aside, I just realized that I needed to write more for this blog post. Currently, the blog is due in about an hour and I am really tired, so my writing will be rather abysmal. Apologies in advance.

Honestly, SSP is like a double edged sword. Over the past two and a half weeks, there were times where I felt extremely proud of myself, and there were also times where I questioned if my decision to join SSP was a right decision.

Some backstory, I am a rather typical teenager from a suburban city near Los-Angeles who enjoys physics. While working on my application, I never expected to get into SSP. Two months later, surprise. I realised I got into SSP! I was so shocked when I got the “congratulations” email that I almost fell off my chair. I couldn’t wait to go to SSP

The first day of SSP: God that day was rough, I was overwhelmed and dumbfounded by all the new knowledge and software (ex. JPL horizons) that I was on the verge of mental breakdown. As the days passed, everything got better exponentially. I became less and less lost and was much more relaxed. I started to see the connection between the different concepts and began having fun. Even though there were still stressful moments, SSP became very enjoyable. 

Looking back, I am so surprised by just how much I learned in the past two and a half weeks. I came in as a physics nerd who didn’t know much about astronomy. Right now, however, I understand so many new concepts such as relative magnitude, noise, and celestial coordinates. In fact, I even found an asteroid that I was looking for, a feat unimaginable to me two weeks ago.