Today was the first actual day of the event, which was exciting! I woke up at 8:11 am, shortly before my alarm went off. It’s always nice when that happens because I feel less groggy when I wake up naturally. I took my time to get ready in the morning before heading down to breakfast, where I ate with a bunch of other West Coasters. The East Coast finalists aren’t allowed to arrive until 10 am, so there’s still only 10 of us at the hotel.
Since there aren’t many group activities scheduled today, we have to record our Project Videos, in which, as you guessed, we make a video explaining our project. It’s supposed to be 3-5 minutes long and you can’t really read off of a script, so after we eat breakfast, we practice our speeches on each other. Some people memorized entire scripts, while others made an outline of what they wanted to talk about. I was in the latter camp. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of breakfast, but it was a ton of fun to hear other people’s speeches and learn about their projects. For example, I learned from Minghao that it’s complex to model systems with large number of particles because they have lots of interactions with each other. I also learned from Akilan that when a fluid of a certain viscosity vibrates near its resonance frequency, a droplet can seem to levitate on top of it.
I was planning on recording my Project Video after lunch, but since many of the East Coast travelers were delayed by thunderstorms near the airport (the same one as yesterday, in fact), I must record the video sooner, at 11:30 am. I had seen the Project Videos from previous years, and had always imagined that the Society for Science had some sort of special box or something that the videos were recorded in. It actually turns out that they are set up in hotel rooms — completely emptied of their furniture — with filming equipment and a black backdrop behind the poster. Before my video, I practiced my script a few times with Charlotte, and to my surprise, when I recorded the actual video I spoke better than I was when I was practicing. My first take was decent, but just to be safe I did three takes. Even though I thought the last would be the best because had the most practice, when I reviewed it I realized that I was actually pretty stiff. Maybe I had gotten tired from the other takes. I ended up selecting the second for use on the website.
After I recorded my Project Video, I headed back down to get lunch. Some of the East Coast finalists had arrived, so I finally got to meet them in person. Well technically, not everyone was from the East Coast; some were from Texas, but they were designated as East Coast for travel purposes. I met Chloe, who had developed a new drug like Tylenol that is less inflammatory, and Allison, who had found a better way to classify galaxy mergers using machine learning. I had a roast beef sandwich and salad for lunch, and for dessert I had a carrot cake cookie sandwich of sorts (I forgot what the hotel called it).
After lunch were more tasks, like the casual photoshoot. I talked to one of the photographers, Chris, about Adobe Lightroom. It turned out that a bunch of the tasks that I manually did in Photoshop, like lightening or darkening certain features in images, could be automatically done with AI algorithms in Lightroom. He also took a bunch of photos of me. I haven’t seen the results yet, but I hope they turned out good. During one of the photos, he asked me to write in a notebook. I started writing the formal definition of a limit, but halfway through realized that I forgot the order of the quantifiers. Right after my photoshoot was Akilan’s, and after seeing what I had written in the notebook, he asked me what I was trying to write. We ended up going from a discussion on real analysis and metric spaces to a conversation on the Basel problem, all while Chris was taking more pictures of us. I guess the Society for Science wanted some “dynamic pictures” where people are talking to each other and writing on a whiteboard.
Shortly after that photoshoot, I had my Highlights Video. I was sat on a chair and answered questions while two cameras were pointed at me. The idea was that the videos from all of the finalists would be stitched together into a cohesive piece when people overlapped in what they said. In between all of the previous appointments, I talked to a few other finalists about going outside at some point during the day. For the most part, we aren’t allowed to leave the hotel, so many of us wanted to get some fresh air. We decided that we were going to go on a walk to the White House. So after the Highlights Video, I found a group of a dozen other finalists plus our chaperones and headed outside. I had forgotten my hat, and it was very cold and windy outside. But I was happy to be outside and in others’ company, so I didn’t really notice it. When we finally arrived at the White House, I was a bit disappointed that we couldn’t get any closer. It was still cool to see it though, especially since this was my first time in D.C.
After heading back to the hotel, I had a bit of downtime before dinner, so I hung out in the finalist lounge. Again, dinner was great, especially the tomato pie which was so sweet that it almost tasted like dessert! I was seated at a table with other people from my team, which is a group of eight other finalists supervised by the same chaperone. It was great to get to know the others and my assigned buddy, Ashley. After dinner, we saw a few videos from. One was from a senior executive at Regeneron and the other was from previous STS finalists giving us tips for judging. There were also a few speeches and instructions from various other Society for Science staff. Maya Ajmera, the CEO, reminded us that even if we don’t get one of the top 10 spots we are still all winners.
When all of the speeches had concluded, we had a short break before doing icebreakers. The first was drawing a sketch of our neighbor without looking down at the paper and lifting up our pencil. Then we had to hold up the sketches and guess which person it was supposed to represent. My sketch was not very good, but thankfully it was drawn near the end so it was easy to narrow down who it was supposed to be. Next, we had science words taped to our backs and we had to ask others questions and try to figure out what it was. My word was electron, which was not too hard to guess, but Ashley had transmethylation! Finally, we played a bingo of sorts, where we had to find the finalist that matched the fun fact square on the bingo card, and I won a rubber duck.
When we finished the icebreakers, I hung out in the finalist lounge for about half an hour before deciding to head back to my room to get some rest, where I wrote this blog post!
