by Antonio K.
While thinking about ideas to write about in this blog post, I reflected a lot on my experience at SSP, and the craziness of it all hit me hard. It seems that every new day in this program beats the previous one in terms of intensity and craziness. Picture this – after taking the plane for the first time in my life and arriving in the United States, thousands of miles from home, I was quite literally immediately physically thrown (*) into a daily routine consisting of 6 hours of lectures and many more for working on problem sets or observing. Every single class here feels like a trimester of work at normal school, and it is definitely not easy to keep up, especially when you average 5 hours of sleep a night, which I definitely do not, I’m just saying. As one of the few people who had not taken calculus before arriving, the calc lecture made me learn things at a whooping rate, and I still wonder how my brain managed to get any of this stuff. Going from the basic definition of derivatives to what felt like a foreign language was indeed not easy at all.
One of the things that helped me keep up is the collaborative environment at SSP, and how nice everyone is with each other. SSP is one of the few times in which I am surrounded from everywhere by extremely smart and hard-working people and it feels amazing to bond with all of those people through our common passion for mathematics and sciences. This felt very intimidating at first, but I’ve come to like it a lot. Learning about everybody’s interests and backgrounds is one of my favorite things here and it’s nice to know that I can freely help and get help whenever I want. This is one of the aspects of SSP that led me to apply, and I am so very glad that it lived up to the hype.
So yeah… if crazy is the perfect expression to describe my first week at SSP, set of incredibly fun, random and unpredictable events is a close second. Whether it’s checking out the burrito place at 2 Ante Meridiem just because we were feeling like it, breaking my phone for an extremely stupid reason (don’t say that to Dr. Ice, though) or spontaneously assembling to play Super Smash in the lounge at random times, SSP has been a lot of fun. The next few weeks promise to be very tiring and fun as well, and I’m excited to interact more with this group of crazy people at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
* Just wanted to point out that I am definitely not making fun of the very hyperbolic language that Americans use.
About Me
Hey! I’m Antonio and I come from a small country called Burkina Faso, right in the middle of West Africa. This is my first time in the United States, and I love to not sleep, to engage in traumatizing summer experiences, to procrastinate on assignments by working on others, and to listen to interesting people talk: SSP has been amazing so far!