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Summer Visit - 2013 - C-CWEL

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 "C-CWEL" team came to visit in August 2013. The core team educators attended, plus 11 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] I have had a challenge and I want to continue with the challenge and find new stars.
  • I think the best part about the trip and NITARP as a whole is the chance to do authentic research and learn the methods and techniques used to tease as much information out of the data as possible. It still amazes me (and this is what I try to instill in the students in my astronomy classes) that we can learn so much from a tiny point of light if we are just cleaver enough to know how to look at it.
  • [student: This experience changed the way I thought about astronomy.] Very much so – I figured out it is a competitive field, it really is fun, it is very different than the science we do in school (in a good way).
  • Teachers need to maybe be reminded that it is OK if they don’t have any idea what they are doing at times – and that they are not expected to be experts in the field. They do need to be able to admit when they are confused, be open to feed back from other team members, and have time to commit to the study.
  • [student:] I was surprised that there were no clean, concrete answers. A lot of the time we had to look at information and make decisions and assumptions based on the data and our previous knowledge. No one was going to tell us that a star we were looking at was definitely a YSO. Science in the real world is more subjective and that is a lot different from how we learn in a school science lab. Things are messy and unclear because we're still trying to figure things out. There are anomalies that we can't explain yet, but that's why we keep researching, examining, and inquiring.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2013 - C-CWEL