• NASA
  • IPAC

Summer Visit - 2013 - SHIPs

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 days long and is the only time during the year of work when all the participants on the team come together in person to work intensively on the data. Generally, each educator may bring up to two students to the summer visit that are paid for by NITARP, and they may raise funds to bring two more. The teams work at Caltech; the summer visit typically includes a half-day tour of JPL, which is a favorite site for group photos. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The SHIPs team came to visit in June 2013. The core team educators attended, plus 9 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] But, I didn't think programming would be such a big part of scientific research, simply because the two are never really associated with one another in science classes at school, so I was happy to discover its importance in the field.
  • I was also surprised not to be more tired. Don't get me wrong, I certainly took a five hour nap on Saturday after coming home on the red-eye from LA, but overall the week left me invigorated rather than exhausted.
  • I was surprised with the speed with which my students increased their proficiency with the tools we are using -- especially Python programming! My students acted very independently and hardly ever needed me to suggest something for them to do next; many times they were already anticipating the next tasks and trying to figure out how to do it!
  • [student:] Before this trip I thought that everyone in this field had similar jobs, and they were all related to research. Now I've realized that there are so many different jobs that go into NASA. Learning the computer and research aspects of astronomy while seeing the engineering and construction aspects at JPL really opened my eyes to all the different job opportunities in this field.
  • Because we are learning programming, it will take more time to write script to do the analysis but it will be easier to change that script and apply it to different situations once it is written. Programming is also an invaluable tool that we can only pass on to our students if we are confident using it in complex situations ourselves. [...]It is already becoming apparent that coding is going to make our ability to look at and compare many sources manageable.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2013 - SHIPs