“Yo, you realize we’re lowkey not gonna see a lot of the people here ever again a week from now?” said my roommate Dhanush before he went to bed, leaving me to ponder over how fast this program has flown by. I drown the depressing thoughts about SSP nearing its end with music as I hit a workout in our bathroom so as to not disturb my sleep-conscious roommate.
I take full advantage of the opportunity to sleep in on a Sunday morning, waking and going back to sleep maybe 3 times between 9 and 12 before I finally drag myself to lunch. The food here leaves much to be desired but it’s tolerable enough that I usually leave the table with a sizable stack of empty plates.
Post-lunch, I head over to Nikhilesh’s room for a quick study session to at least feel productive. I marvel at how clean and organized their space is compared to the wreck that is my half of the dorm. After filling a page front and back chock-full of equations, derivatives, and mental math, I arrive at nothing and decide to give up as the study session devolves into a yap sesh.
It’s somehow 4PM now, and we wander over to Garcia Hall for Lucien’s ‘last and final’ ping pong tournament. I ping and pong my way to the semifinals, squaring up against Charlie, the Brit who has been dominating the ping pong scene here in Las Cruces, ultimately losing. Charlie moves on to the finals where he fought bravely but stood no chance against AAD and ping pong master Dr. Le.
Dinner time rolls around, and with new tables, we realize Staś’ seating algorithm screwed up again as I found myself sitting with people I had sat with before, something he promised shouldn’t happen. My teammates and I walk back to the dorms after dinner to pick up snacks for our first joint Astro I-Astro II ‘mandatory fun’ movie night. Hidden Figures was playing, but being the nerds that we are, many of us were watching it for the third or fourth time.
By the time the movie ends, it’s already 9pm and my workday is just starting. Our team corrects an astrometry report that had been deemed ‘sketchy’ and I finally finish the pset I had been mulling over earlier. Then it’s back to grinding the headache-inducing nightmare of code that is the Method of Gauss orbit determination. Even without the sleep deprivation, debugging it truly makes you question everything that has led up to this point. At long last, my iteration finally decides to work instead of nuking itself by trying to take the square root on a negative semi-major axis value that should definitely not be negative. Errors that were debugged in the process included: naming a variable the exact same thing as a constant, putting more division signs than necessary, and forgetting to comment out hard coded test cases. It’s truly a humbling process, 10/10 would recommend.
Then it’s back to the dorms where we head to bed instead of finishing the Hunger Games movies in the lobby because we’re sensible students who definitely prioritize our sleep. Waking up at noon didn’t really help going to sleep early, so I helped my roommate with a pset before putting on a podcast and falling asleep to it.
SSP has been all that I’ve wished for it to be and so much more. There is no other group of people I would rather brave the 105 degree heat of New Mexico with than this cohort. The people here are some of the smartest I’ve ever met but also incredibly down to Earth and just as willing to work on psets as they are to join a sunset volleyball match or build lego sets together.
I’m Kevin, a rising senior from Illinois. I’m obviously a STEM kid but outside of that, I enjoy trying new foods, building lego, and watching Formula 1 among other things.
