Python God???

Apparently, some people put thought into scheduling their blog post(s). Unfortunately, I was not one of those people, but fortunately, when I randomly picked a date on the scheduling spreadsheet, it happened to land on a Sunday, giving me the maximum amount of time to work on this post. Of course, that maximum time thing was just in theory, so here I am, late Sunday night, writing this post. 

I suppose I’ll start by talking about my feelings about SSP. After I submitted my application, I just pushed it to the back of my mind, trying not to think about it, so you can imagine my surprise when I woke up one day, casually checking my email, and saw a big “Congratulations!” in my inbox. I was excited to be sure, but even more so, I was just confused as to why I got accepted. This whole time, I had been telling myself that I at least gave the application a shot, so it was fine if I didn’t make it. Getting in wasn’t even something I had thought about. 

So then my confidence grew. I was excited for SSP—maybe I really did deserve to get in! The next two months passed in a happy blur, but then doubt began to creep back in. What if I wasn’t smart enough? What if I didn’t fit in? Scrolling through parts of the SSP Discord seemed to confirm my fears as people talked about math and physics topics I had never even heard of. Following the start of SSP, I started worrying about my About Me presentation after seeing some others: seemingly everyone had done some math or physics competition or sent something to the Moon; I just played piano for fun and had a cute dog. After the first learning block, I thought I understood the lecture about coordinates and what not, but I soon learned that being able to follow a lecture and being able to complete a pset are two very different things. 

However, I started realizing that I wasn’t alone in my struggles. Even the people with scary About Me presentations were struggling on psets; sometimes I would help them and sometimes they would help me (the latter moreso). I found that everyone, despite their various achievements, were just normal people (well, intelligent people). Fast forward to the night of July 4th, and all I can think about is how exciting tomorrow’s day of SSP will be. 

As for the title, no, I am not some sort of coding genius. However, I do seem to possess some supernatural power. Whenever I look at someone’s Python code, they magically realize some small error they made, and just like that their code works fine. I don’t even say a word and they find it! It’s too bad my powers don’t work on my own code. I feel bad for not using at least one image, so here’s a picture of my dog, Willow.