My first week at SPIRE is officially done and I’m so ecstatic! After my first blog, a lot more stuff happened. On Friday we did team building and it gave me a much better understanding of our research goals to meet throughout the summer. We also went to a Mongolian place where the lady there was super duper nice (but pretty much gaslit us all into getting certain menu items but they were good anyways lol). Saturday we went to Zombie Burger which was actually a really nice place to eat and had silly aesthetics. The escape room was surprisingly easy and we went to the Redbull Soapbox racing where a lot of people crashed. We also played sand volleyball later at night which sparked a newfound love for volleyball in my heart when I absolutely BLOCKED Aidan’s spike on us. Sunday was the first day I was able to go back to the gym and oh man it was needed, I feel sore and refreshed but ready for the next day. Other than that, today we started C++ and I feel super ready for it, it’s very different from Java but I really find the idea of “flowing” with the << and >> operators so fascinating and satisfying to use! Also here are some adorable animals I saw throughout these days!