Author: Grant W.
You wake up early. What do you do with this time before the learning blocks start? You click endlessly back and forth between the calendar and module tab on Canvas, looking for assignments to do before SSP starts for the day. You want to see if you can prepare to learn all of high school calculus or a semester of astronomy in two hours. You look forward to the weekend when you have the chance to spend 7 hours looking through a telescope with Dr. R until 4 in the morning. Maybe sometime in between sessions you can attend one of Gerry’s mindfulness sessions and “image you’re in a river” or even “consult your photon” for pset answers. In the work/play block you work the psets and play with your answers until they are within a reasonable margin of error.
So far, SSP has been exactly what I expected, except in a completely different way than I expected. Let me explain. I knew going into this program that this program would challenge both my academic side as well as my mental toughness as a whole. I assumed that this would lead to long nights of banging my head on my keyboard out of frustration, which it did. However, SSP’s environment has made me look forward to these instances. It gives me the chance to bang my head against my keyboard, but with people that are doing the exact same thing. The frustration only leads to opportunities to think hard with my teammates and ultimately solve a problem, which gives me great satisfaction.
The day started out with the social block. A time where we were able to metaphorically flail around in breakout rooms, attempting to finish an escape room. While many were able to escape within minutes others, *ahem*, took a little longer to figure out the first puzzle.
Today we had the pleasure of listening to Blaise Aguera y Arcas, who managed to get Dr. R to admit that he was not actually a human and presented conversations that he has had with AI that seem more coherent than many of my own conversations.
In the next learning block we continued down our long and winding road to orbit determination. After the lecture on some vector and matrix transformations, we were split up into breakout rooms to work on some practice problems. In these rooms, my team rediscovered graphing, except with a twist.
After the 3 hour break, when I had been longing for more work to do, we moved into the work/play block. During this session there was some general keyboard-head banging but nothing compared to some of the other psets. After I spent way too much time formatting my output to match the sample one exactly, I experienced the mess that was my code as I tried to comment it. I managed to survive this daunting task and provide some emotional support to those still struggling.
Leavenly Procrastibakers series 3/3:
Hello! I’m Grant from upstate New York (real upstate New York, not Buffalo). I like the music that your parents like (or so I’ve been told) and I enjoy hiking, golfing, biking, and running. I am a member of an FTC robotics team and I enjoy CAD design and manufacturing through 3D printing and CNC.