It’s about that time in the program where the days begin to blur into one another. We have at once been here for just a couple days – strangers who met just this week, still discovering each other’s preferred pastimes – and yet somehow, for weeks and weeks on end – a group comfortable enough with each other to squeeze all twelve of themselves into a single elevator each night.
As Site Director of this pilot synthetic chemistry program, I am continually impressed with the level of rigor each day, as well as the matching level of enthusiasm the faculty and participants alike bring to meet it – I see complex molecular structures and reaction mechanisms far beyond my comprehension dotting the whiteboards and participants’ notebooks; I step into the lab to see instruments with more tubes than I’ve encountered in all my time as a high school chemistry teacher; I overhear safety notes about the lachrymator benzyl compounds they’ll be working with today (so potent that they are actually tear gasses banned by the UN); I read the submissions for a Question of the Day, which has sparked debate about whether the use of D for deuterium or T for tritium count. While it’s different from my background in astrophysics, it’s undoubtedly SSP – there was the usual excitement about stickers as teams put up their first milestones on the progress chart.
Following our evening meal (and their evening lecture), we had our first (optional) trip off campus. We embarked on a one-mile walk through residential Weatherford to a local grocery store. Despite the challenging weather conditions – 90 degrees Fahrenheit, complete with high humidity – a combination of habituation and cloud cover made it somewhat more tolerable, and participants gathered everything from laundry detergent to a stuffed animal present for a TA celebrating a birthday in their baskets and carts.
Residential Weatherford
The evening’s highlight was a karaoke session hosted by that same TA – and each team picked a song to start us off. As the first team modified the URL directly, I hoped it wouldn’t be this song (it was). The remaining selections surprised me – “Let it Go,” “Party in the USA,” and “You Belong With Me,” followed by the TAs with “I’ll Make a Man Out of You.” I guess I figured that these songs, which for the most part, could’ve featured (or did feature) at my own SSP, would’ve been replaced by now. Something about it all struck me as incredibly nostalgic.
Karaoke night
Over a decade ago, while I was writing my own blog post, I never thought I’d be doing the same thing again – but about a different scientific field, from a different position, in a different state, and with different people. But what’s incredibly familiar is the degree to which everything is familiarly incredible, in a way that transcends all of these things, to make the kind of summer that’s uniquely SSP.
