w-w-w-w-what day is it?


i- its like day 10? I’ve become fully adjusted to ssp at this point hehe

Dorm life so far has been stressful and taxing extremely fun and exciting!1!1!11!!

My roommate has been amazing and is on their way to aur-ifying the entire camp (his name is now called daurvidaur). 

I feel super immersed now–we do nothing but go to lab to die with poor yields and bad results to conduct our research, eat, sleep (sometimes), work on our final paper, and making sure that we don’t have any phi-psi outliers in MOE (you know who you are <3)

The instructors here are amazing too! The Academic Directors (Dr. H, Dr. Park, and Dr. Rachel who is technically not one but is so helpful she might as well be) are amazing and are super approachable and generally make the entire experience in the lab less bad feel exciting and interesting. Unfortunately, Dr. Park had to go home to be with her doggos (hope they’re still well!) and Dr. Rachel is moving to MN to her new college! Lab was thankfully alright today with some (minor) hiccups in gel electrophoresis results but Dr. H managed to get all 12 groups nice and settled (and please please please I sincerely hope that we do not find some unimaginable way to screw up our results preparing the second gel was absolute pain and i do not want to do it againnnn :s pls make it work). The labs (with the exceptions of the chromatography and gels) are always super fun to get hands on lab experience, and to just be working with actual cell samples and proteins makes SSP that much more impactful and memorable. 

Camp/Dorm life has also been amazing so far–Mr. Chen is the best Site Director we could have asked for, bringing us snacks at all times of the day and taking us out on numerous outings (we do not mention the bus shhhh :3). Our TA’s Trevor, Emily, Karenna, and Mema (pronounced meemaw, although she is definitely not one and also her name is Emma) are also amazing, helping us out so much during lab and outside of lab–whether it be giving us a hand with MOE when it decides it shall be temperamental towards us (can you tell I hate that program?) or on our various problem sets and class activities, we can always count on them to help us out and make sure we don’t tear our hair out we don’t catastrophically destroy our experiments by not following lab procedures. 

The food is pretty good: there’s always grass–i mean salad, some sort of chinese takeout (more accurately riposs panda), decent pizza–you know, the standard dining hall fare. What’s nice is the flexibility after dinner: we have 5 (maybe 6 if you are a coffee addict) hours of unstructured time to do whatever we want–chat with labmates and friends, work on our paper, have a good time with friends (for your safety please avoid chess), among other activities. 

SSP feels familiar now–somewhere that I can learn and explore and have fun in and not have any grade anxiety (although there is certainly lab anxiety about messing something up! :D) It’s something that I can already see being a huge part of my high school experience, and I’m incredibly excited for the rest of the program. 

About me: Hey there, I’m Jonathan! I’m a sophomore from the Bay Area (yes, yes, stereotypes I know but I promise im not that sweaty), and I enjoy cooking, playing rhythm games, spending time with my brother, and sleeping! I really like learning about things and tinkering (not breaking) things including but not limited to: my computer, my family’s internet, and my family’s kitchen. Also I really love science. I feel like I should mention that.