Don't disregard SSP

astrowanna
Wed, 02 Nov 2005 11:31:44 +0000

Ooh! SSP and RSI on one thread! I actually attended SSP in sophomore summer and RSI in junior summer (hey, “sran”!!). The two programs are VERY different.

A typical day at SSP was astronomy lecture and physics lecture from 9am to about 3pm (with a lunch break, of course). After that, the rest of the day was dedicated to the orbit determination project. For some people that meant 3 or 4 hours in the measuring room (known as Azkaban our year) analyzing their photographic exposures. Other people had midnight observation sessions to prepare for. Other people had some time to relax and work on the Problem of the Night or the physics and astronomy problem sets. Everyone essentially rotates through those three subsets depending on their research group’s schedule for each week, how fast they got their exposures, how long it took them to measure, etc. There’s a thread on SSP in the High School Life forum for more perspective on SSP.

On the other hand, at RSI, depending on your field, an average day could be spent doing an 8-hour workday in a lab. OR for those ridiculous math mentorships, it could mean sleeping until noon, meeting with your mentor for an hour, and then finding a nice corner in a library to work on your project individually. For me, it was the former of those two scenarios. The rest of time outside of lab was spent doing random stuff: working on a massive 6ftx6ft crossword, playing Ultimate, being sketchy, pimping it up, etc.

RSI is a much larger program than SSP. Thus, the SSP culture seemed a lot more closeknit during the program than RSI did. There were many people at RSI who I hardly talked to, whereas at SSP I knew everyone really well. However, RSI, being in the middle of Cambridge, does foster a much richer social atmosphere (Rocky Horror, anyone?) than SSP did.
Despite the greater prestige of RSI, SSP was a much more stimulating intellectual and research experience for me, probably because of the daily classes and EXTREMELY hands-on, unpredictable research project. At RSI we were left more on our own and the quality of the research projects was much more variable. I know one person who got bunted for lab to lab when her mentor didn’t realize that she actually had to complete a research project in the 6 weeks and actually went from a bio project to a math project. My project went really well, but it was entirely programming-based, which was a bit of a letdown after the variety of SSP.

I would say that SSP is a more structured, dependable experience, while the spontaniety of RSI can lead to much more brilliant research OR much crappier research.

P.S. Another thing to note with the number of RSI vs. SSP grads who go to top colleges is that (as mentioned above) RSI is more than twice as large as SSP. If I knew percentages for the two, that would probably be more helpful, but I don’t. Does anyone else happen to know what percentage of Rickoids vs. SSPers go to the top colleges?

P.P.S. Another plus to RSI is that they essentially have a college mafia disguised as an alumni association, which can come in quite handy. ;)