Ah, my first day coming to SSTP. I had no idea what to expect. I just got back from California the day before and now my parents and I were going to take a nice 10 hour drive to the University of Iowa. Due to my parent's excessive concern about "not wanting to be late", I was the first person at the dorm. One of my Resident Advisor's (R.A) was there and he introduced himself. The other 2 R.A's were at the airport picking up other students. My R.A had participated in SSTP three years ago, and loved the experience so much, he wanted to be there again. The director of the program gladly accepted him to come back as an R.A. In the next couple of hours, the rest of the kids came in. We had a nice little welcome picnic where everybody introduced themselves and I said my goodbye's to my parents. Now camp officially started. I spent the rest of the day getting to know everyone else and found out some interesting things. We had students from all over the country…Michigan, New York, Alaska (yes, Alaska!), Minnesota, Florida.

The next morning, one of my R.A's showed me where my lab was (he actually was a graduate student working in the same lab, so I just walked with him). Here, I met my professor, and she introduced me to my project. I was working in a Chemistry lab, but my professor told me that the project I was working on had a pharmaceutics perspective to it as well, so I had a lab there as well. At first, this was fairly daunting, but working in two different areas was a great experience! Anyway, my professor told me what I was trying to accomplish with my project, along with the specific steps needed to get there. She said that this was something new which was being done, so a little bit of experimenting will probably have to be done, and there is no guarantee that my project will work. At first, this was a little upsetting to me, but I quickly realized, experimentation is what science research is about and nothing is a guaranteed success in the scientific world. She then presented me with roughly a million papers of research articles to read over as background, along with giving me library book references (as we could check out books at the university library). At any time, I was welcome to come into her office to ask her questions, and the other students in the lab could help me out as well.

The rest of the week at lab I spent doing all my research (which was quite extensive, yet extremely helpful!) and making a slow start on my project. I was asking every graduate student for something or another, whether it be "Where can I find pipettes?" to "How do I use this machine?" (I had to use an apparatus that heated something up to >500 degrees in my first week, and I didn't want to hurt myself :)

The first week, I'd get done from lab pretty early, and I'd come back to find nobody else in the dorm. I'd do one of various things: read, take a nap, talk to an R.A (if one was present), or wait for other kids. I was willing to spend time with anybody who was a part of SSTP since they literally all had common interests as me. Dinner was provided at the cafeteria from 5-6 each night (though, there were many nights where I went out with other kids to eat dinner in the city).

Each night of the first week was something different. We started out on Monday with a communications workshop, where we each gave introductions on our projects, and started to learn how to write a proper abstract. After that, we just hung out back at the dorm until each of us felt tired. Provided we weren't being excessively noisy, there was no curfew for us, except that we had to be back in the building by 10:30 each weeknight. Once we were in the building, we could do whatever we wanted, provided it was appropriate. The rest of the nights were spent relaxing, watching movies, playing outside, or walking around the city. Our week came to an end when we got to go a water park on Saturday.

The nice part about SSTP is that while research may encompass the weekdays, the weeknights and weekends are spent doing recreational and extremely fun activities. The things that I realized was most appealing about camp was that I could put in 12 hours at my lab on some days, and still find time to just relax with my friends by watching a movie, listening to someone play their guitar, playing video games (our R.A had every system imaginable, along with a big screen T.V in his room), or by walking around. [Note: this wasn't just the first week; this was true for all six]