Lilly

There is no plane this summer. Last year I watched mountains go by from above and below, my guide into the valley where I’d do my work, venturing out only for long hikes in the high-altitude sunlight. This year things are more familiar. Flatlands. A few hills. I’ve heard there are lakes and trails. Somewhere.

Even in the mass cerebral slowdown that is the undergraduate’s “off season,” I find that work begins to pile up quickly. Like any driven, responsible, well-organized student, I ignore most of it. I could be completing my online lab safety course or reading the book we’ll be discussing at dinner the first night of my internship, but instead I spend hours inventing mathematics over text with a friend, trying to solve a particularly annoying statistics problem in his research that seems to be just beyond our summer-addled minds. The clock ticks past midnight and we’re still grinding our teeth over regression analysis. I thought I had a breakthrough earlier that had both of us scrambling at our keyboards for confirmation before realizing at the same time that my plan had a fatal flaw. A simultaneity of sorts. A simultaneity of minds, achieved even over the distance between us.

Moments like these are important to me. They tell me that even when I feel put off by my work, it’s only because it’s just that—work. Work is responsibility is stress is dreading even starting it, and I do believe that a certain amount of that can still be perfectly healthy. But it’s also healthy to let myself play with things. Give myself a problem to mull over that’s not going to make or break even a single thread of my academic standing and just let myself think about it. Thinking is so important. So much of my education has been dedicated to the computational act of solving a problem when what I’ve always found much more difficult—and much more interesting—is the act of finding and understanding the process of the solution in the first place. Plugging the numbers can only bring so much satisfaction, compared to my friend crowing “Oh, if this works, it’ll be beautiful” as we both type furiously in our respective terminals to verify my theory. The thrill is of discovery, even if it’s nothing new, nothing big, nothing “important.”

I get to the rest of it all eventually, though. The work. I do the safety training. I read the book. I start thinking about what else I’m going to need to understand for my project this summer—some particle physics; some new mathematics; apparently I’m going to have to learn C++. I meet my roommate. She is passionate and put-together. She’s been here for a week already, she explains, and will leave a week early; the program was quite willing to accommodate her preexisting summer schedule. Interesting. That means I’ll have the room to myself during the last week of the program—symposium week, presentation week, our final chance to prove that we’ve learned something. A little bit of last summer, granted at the last minute of this one: time spent alone in a room meant for two. ♦