I Haven't The Slightest Idea: Summer Science Program

After 6 fantastic weeks, it's ironic that I can not come up with words. It's a pleasant blur. So let's just deal with it one story at a time. The Summer Science Program (SSP) explicitly states that the aim of the program is to initiate students who are already interested in science. Keep note of that.

At school, I have to do Physics, Chemistry, Math, Computer Science and English for 11th and 12th grades. That is concentrated science. At home, there's t.v. - with all kinds of social entertainment, the newspapers, magazines and editorials in them, which whet my appetite for the humanities and then there are books - not exactly literature, but some form of human expression. So on the whole, my brain is objected to more than just scientific thinking.
(As I write this, I feel like I'm lying to myself. I certainly do not have the balance I would like - considering my courses at school. But everything in the world is relative, so here we go. )

Academically, SSP is so much science that if you tried to calculate the potency of science at SSP, it would be  less than 0 or greater than 14. On my first day, as I walked into our home for 6 weeks with a bunch of strangers, we received our IDs, key cards and a sheet of paper. "Here's your first homework, it's due in 2 days. Welcome to SSP".

I loved the Physics and Astronomy lectures for the first 2 days. Because the art and poetry on the whiteboard were familiar. We had just learned about co-ordinate systems for the sky. Right Ascension and declination seemed to be very practical concepts.They were turning up everywhere in our Asteroid Proposal.    (The Asteroid Proposal that we wrote on the very first day when most of us might as well have asked , "Wait, what exactly is an asteroid?" )And Kepler's laws of motion were also obviously relevant to the Orbit Determination we would do later. Didn't I love science?

Orbit Determination - The Gaussian Method
(Yes, I just want to sound cool.)
As the days progressed, every evening was submerged in a sea of assignments. How would the analemma change if aliens rotated the Earth, or if the eccentricity of Earth's orbit is 0? And here is Rutherford's scattering experiment. What's the hodograph of the particles? And how can you predict the trajectory of the particle using the hodograph? It would be long after the sunset by the time we figured out the answers. For some, the time would be just before sunrise. The sun sets after 8:30 P.M. and rises before 6:00A.M at Socorro in the summer, just so you know.

After 2 weeks, the topics begin to spiral out of our "Earth Manuscript" zone and begin to resemble alien scripts from our dreams. Suddenly, science defined my life. My thought process might as well be mimicking "The Scientific Method". The universe is relative. So, at this point, my life back home started to seem balanced between the intuition and evaluation; emotions and judgement; science and humanities. The tipping point was when a guest lecturer repeatedly used the phrase, "As scientists, we..." Umm, As a Scientist, will there be no more to me than Science? My life is not going to be a logical flowchart.

Before SSP, I knew Computer Programming was my thing. Quoting my own journal,
"Programming is the perfect balance between math and literature, art and science. It is poetry. And it is logic. It's what I'm looking for." 

Two weeks into the program, my words of love morph into, 
" I am not sure of a STEM major anymore. I think I need culture, people, emotions and expression." 


I did not like spending my days in front of a computer screen. Another week later,
"Why do we even ask so many questions? Why do we want the answers? I like mystery." 


That is a cruel fork.
By the end of the program, I came to a conclusion after much debate with my journal. I was worried that I was giving up on science because I could not understand it, for the first time. Perhaps I have the dedication it takes to commit to Science. But I was not alone. There were 35 other students whose rants I heard everyday, "I'm going to be an English major!" or "Art History - that's my thing".  So maybe I've been living under an illusion all along, giving in to social pressure although I was just not into science.That is too much for a 16 year old to process without bias and head-and-wall collisions.

So I ended my great debate with these words, 
"I probably should not form an opinion about any subject before I go to college. When I find (or re-find) my calling, I will just know."

Now if you remember what the aim of SSP is supposed to be, you may find my entire 'debate' ironic. SSP intended to reinforce my interest in science, to convince me that I was meant for a STEM major. SSP should have improved my clarity. Instead, now when someone asks me what I'm going to do in college or in life, I say- "I haven't the slightest idea." 


P.S.: It irks me that my online text editor questions the existence of the words "hodograph" and "analemma" but happily accepts "re-find" as a legit English word. (That raises a question - can science be considered English? Should all scientific terms be excluded from the conventional English dictionary? )

P.P.S: Yes, that was only one story. 
Location: Socorro, NM, USA

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