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7 days so far
6 QoDs
5 Sleepless Nights
4 Outings
3 Teammates
2 PSETs completed
1 and only CUB
When I started thinking about what to write in the blog, what struck me was how the time this week felt distant and yet so fresh simultaneously. As I worked on the Problem Set (PSET) question of whether the Big Dipper is visible year round (spoiler – a small portion is not), I remembered our Planetarium visit last week as something that happened ages ago. Time really does break the law of Physics here. Soon enough, one week into SSP, the workflow has become a bit more amenable as we have acclimated to the late night observations and the PSET work spanning a wide plethora of subjects. A quick glimpse into today after a hike-heavy Sunday involved getting back into the usual routine of lectures, but with a few twists…welcoming our first guest speaker! By coincidence (I didn’t even realise until a few days ago), I was the Guest Speaker Crew and Blogger for Monday, hence involving a deep dive into Dr Hardegree-Ullman as he shared his knowledge on exoplanets and introduced us to different methods of detection.
The meal times in between lectures and speakers provided us a short hiatus from the Observatory. The food as usual, had a fantastic spread for lunch and dinner, with one of my personal objectives being to vary my cuisine and expand my palate. Today’s ventures led me to Persian cuisine: some varieties of rice, barbequed vegetables with a ton of choices for sauces (Hummus and Tzatziki are my personal favourites). Soon after an absolutely fantastic afternoon involving Q/As on STEM research careers with lots of baked goodies, all of us were back in reality – our 2nd PSET was due tonight.
I had another mission before that – deciphering the coded message (really tells a lot about SSP’s objective 😉 Today’s Question of the Day (colloquially our QoD) set by our TA Alan was out and about – us CUBs had to figure out a secret cipher. While Python was allowed, I worked on reversing the code by hand instead with Tejus (collaboration allowed today as PSET was really long) since we had some lines by hand already. Maybe not the most strategic given its length…
A sharp 7:30pm deadline looming meant that we needed to speed up unravelling two alternating Caesar ciphers (I learnt the name afterwards). After panicking a little bit as the printer was in a backlog, we ran towards the TA office, set on turning it in at 7:30:59 (I don’t remember the exact time but it was close).
As deadlines came one after another, the collective 36 of us united together, all in a joint mission to complete the programming and get the code checked by the TAs (thank you so much!). We battled in the land of debugging, fighting against vicious edge cases and syntax errors for us to emerge victorious and conquer the PSET 2 (I was working with Vincent, Ellie and Sadie today!). I absolutely love the camaraderie that it brings out as everyone goes out of their way to help each other and is eager to learn and do more (or as Dr Dubson says, make new neural connections). From 6:30 to past midnight, the computer lab is abuzz with chatter on best approaches for calculating determinants, new libraries to plot projectiles and debugging hacks to get past edge cases.
One thing I learnt here soon enough after my PSET submission… The night here does not get much longer. We just start a new day afresh. My group (hi Kaku and Eisha!) were up for observing – midnight shift. Despite this only being our second time, the late PSET nights had trained and helped us familiarise ourselves with the telescope system (very befittingly named TheSky – imagine saying Close TheSky). We successfully spotted our asteroid once again, waiting to reduce data after taking a series of 50 images with varying filters and exposure times.
As I think about the days and weeks ahead on the way back to Crosman Hall (I have called it home every once in a while), there is a lot to juggle and manage now, probably more to come. But, what makes it even more enthralling and worth it at the end is the experiences and memories we make together in 5.5 weeks. It is the little things such as a late night programming session with friends, funky QoDs, the keen anticipation of the Observation sticker checkmark or the Ratatouille CUB 2024 board that we remember, take away with us and build our character.
In summary,
1 week out and 4 more to go.
A lot to do.
Looking forward to more late nights, learnings and musings of the CUBs!
Fun fact: Did you notice I used the recent scientific image conventions from a lecture this week?
About me: Hey! I’m Ilisha, a rising senior currently based in Singapore and absolutely loving Boulder. I’m originally from India but studying in United World College of South-East Asia, Dover. I’m excited about delving deeper into physics and exploring new topics such as Asteroids. Hoping to pursue Physics in the future, I’m into stargazing, sustainability, cubing and debate. Happy to talk more!
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SSP International is a nonprofit offering inspiring science immersion experiences. Founded in 1959, its mission is to provide opportunities to accelerate learning, doing and belonging in science. SSP International’s flagship program is Summer Science Program, a leading education experience for exceptional high school students in astrophysics, biochemistry, genomics and more.
