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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

  • Again, NITARP never fails to positively surprise me by changing my perception of astronomy and the scientific process in general. I have been blown away with the amount of work that, for our respective project, goes into reducing a tiny patch on the sky. There is so much to know and not enough time to learn everything - I understand what PhD really means and how astronomy explains the Universe.
  • [student: This experience] made me realize that the astronomy shows I love to watch are way, way, way simplified. Real astronomy requires a deeper understanding of math and many other sciences as well as a ton of persistence. It also made me realize that most astronomers don't spend all of their nights looking through a telescope. A lot of astronomers receive data from a telescope and then spend months analyzing that data.
  • I was pleasantly surprised at the mature behavior and intellectual level of the student participants. They have taken the work seriously, enjoyed the out of work time activities and gained an incredible new network of resources for their future career endeavors. The students make excellent partners for learning and are highly able to acquire new skills. When partnered with more careful and experienced researchers, they can move through large data sets with ease, and accuracy. They are more easily frustrated by errors and do not have training in trouble shooting and meta-cognition that can let them solve more problems alone.
  • [student:] By understanding the information that SEDs were providing, I was able to draw conclusions about stars and say whether or not they could possibly be a YSO candidate and that's a pretty cool skill!
  • I was pleasantly shocked by the engagement between all educators and all students. The students, all between the ages of 15 and 17, were engaging not only with the teacher they came with but with all the teachers. They were open to learning new things from educators who they were unfamiliar and at the same time assisting one another and every teacher just the same. Throughout the week everyone ran into problems that needed to be solved. Sometimes it was our veteran mentor who came to the rescue. More often than not it was a student who could educate everyone.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2013 - C-CWEL