Knox College Astrophysics Day 30: Last Push to the End (while trying to maintain our sanity)
I opened my eyes to the sound of Erina waking my roommate and I up. I look at my watch: it was already 9:23 am!!! (apparently both of our alarms failed to wake us up, and class starts at 9:30)
We jumped out of bed and somehow made it to class on time. It was a short lecture of around 15 minutes since we needed time to work on our projects, and Dr. Nathalie filled us in on what’s going to happen for the poster presentation tomorrow.
At 9:45, we headed to work on our project. Today was the last full day to work on it, and so Phong, Medha and I locked in (we hadn’t finished the poster, coding for error analysis, formatting data to submit to the Minor Planet Center, or the paper yet).
The Monte Carlo code took a while for us to figure out since it wasn’t converging (boooooooo!). So we spent some time debugging and finally got the data we needed (let’s goooo!!!).
We then headed to Seymour Union for lunch, and I ate quickly to make time to practice for the talent show tomorrow. We have to practice at lunch because the music building closes when we get back from the science building for dinner.
Starting at 1:30 pm, we had the belonging series with Dr. Kemper, and we went over some important aspects of the program (such as how to write a resume).
We spent some time on our project, then headed to dinner (thank you Knox kitchen staff for the delicious food).
The rest of the day was spent on locking in, and we got the poster, MPC, and error code done. We headed back to the dorms at 12:30 am (when the Umbeck Science building closes). Phong, Medha and I were overall pretty productive. Some of us may have spent some time slightly sidetracked though (cough cough such as the one with the Rubik’s in this photo; others were really locked in like the guy **Phong** in the back).
Latex was also being quite uncooperative. Medha ran into quite a few Latex errors:
At the end of the night, the only thing left was the paper. We were pretty happy with the results and so left the science building at 12:30am.
The lack of sleep has been making me think that SSP is a cult:
On a side note, our “asteroid” has been in the process of multiplying. We’ll see how big it gets at the end of the program:
Anyways I should probably go get some sleep now…
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Jingyi (Judy) Z.
Hi! I’m Judy from sunny San Diego. I spend my time cubing, learning random physics facts, watching movies (interstellar is my fav iykyk) and doomscrolling through Reddit. I probably spend wayyy too much time on the latter.
