Hello! My name is Lauren, I am a rising senior from Oregon and I love physics, engineering, reading, and bouldering. I am a member of Team 5, Kraft Maggot Cheese, and here is the story of July 19th, the day reports were due.
Today was an eventful day to say the least, we had our final orbit determination report due and there was a lot of work to be done. I was up early to get to SBO and finish the report with my team. We had finished most of the writing the day before, we just needed to do final edits and the abstract. In our scans of the google doc, we found that in our statistics simulation I had used the wrong date for one of the orbital elements so we did need to re-run that. We finished our google doc version of the report just before lunch, and I had the incredibly ambitious idea to LaTeX the entire report in the afternoon.
There were two problems with this. One, I know (or I guess knew) exactly zero LaTeX, and everyone doing LaTeX was struggling even if they had prior knowledge and two, we couldn’t be in the computer lab between 12:20 and 3:45. So I had about 4 hours to learn LaTeX and format the entire report. I decided to confront that after lunch, and had a wonderful time chatting before we were all summoned back to SBO at 1:15 for a mysterious event.
Upon returning to SBO, we were greeted with a dark classroom and a surprise movie showing! Dr. Dubson was disappointed with our Sci-Fi movie knowledge and we had a special viewing of ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’. It was a wonderful afternoon movie break from the stress of cramming to finish the final report. However the break did come to an end and it was back to the grind. We had about 2 hours until dinner, so it was time to start LaTeX.
It was A Struggle. LaTeX is not kind to the uneducated and decided to put all of my very important tables at the very end of the document. I got some smaller tables working and got all of the writing in, barring figure captions, before dinner. Great, just the hard part left!
After a great dinner, it was time to finally tackle table positioning and putting figures in. It took about 45 minutes of the hour and a half we had left to get the tables where I wanted them. My amazing teammates Sadie and Ethan encouraged me the whole way, they even had a dance.
Side note, it took me like 15 minutes to notice what they were doing since I was so focused.
Frantic Figure Time! I started on the figures with like 40 minutes left, and gave myself 30 minutes before we would just submit the google doc. I figured out how to add figures, one problem was all the images I wanted, I didn’t have saved. I had to spend about 10 minutes getting screenshots of all the Orbital Element Error Distributions and the 3D CAD model of the orbit. We were cutting it CLOSE. I got all the figures in, and spent as much time as I could fighting them to be in the right spot, with like 8 minutes left we decided it was good. I started printing the LaTeX file while Sadie made a cover page, we always gotta have our logo! We had it printed, just needed to staple it and turn it in! We tried one stapler, nothing. It wasn’t working. Ok, the other one in the computer lab? Still nothing. There was one more we could try, up by the TA office. Third times the charm? Nope! With about 3 minutes left we were scrambling to find a stapler and get it in. Back in the classroom, we tried stapler #2 again and it FINALLY worked. One sprint up to the turn in box later and we were done! 1:25 seconds left, but not late! And guess what we learned about 30 seconds after we turned it in? You can share LaTeX documents. That could have been so much easier.
But nonetheless, with the report submitted we were able to finally relax. And get our last stickers! We got the mysterious ? sticker at some point that day, so with the final report in, we had the full chart!
We of course had to count down the last 10 seconds, and then it was all over. Time to celebrate! We went to get boba to celebrate, then we were going to do karaoke. I had a blast walking with Tava, Ellie, Tejus, and Kaci. The boba was great and it was awesome to not have anything to stress over.
After boba, there was karaoke, which also became Just Dance. It was loud, chaotic, silly, and an absolutely amazing way to celebrate. There was a lot of ABBA, Disney, and all the karaoke greats, including my own suggestion of Fireflies.
After karaoke, I chilled in the basement with Tava, Ellie, Tejus, and Kaci discussing the intricacies of luck, magic, government systems, mechanical trickery, snakes, rocks, and contract law. It was an incredible way to end a stressful day just getting to relax and have fun. Definitely one of the most action packed days here and one I will not forget soon.
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