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Summer Visit - 2015 - IC417

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 IC417 team came to visit in June 2015. The core team educators attended, plus 8 students.

Quotes

  • This experience certainly has changed my thoughts about astronomy and astronomers. I really did not know what they did except teach college classes. I enjoyed seeing the less formal and family friendly atmosphere at Spitzer. This experience will be shared with my students for some time.
  • [student:] I am also glad to say that whole reason why we are doing this makes more sense to me as a student. Before I knew what we were searching for but even then I didn’t realize how big of a deal it really was.
  • [student:] I am going back home with so much knowledge and important research to complete, and it just excites me to continue along our path.
  • [student:] I got to deal with the frustrations of being wrong and trying to figure things out, but I also saw the creative solutions people come up with to solve these problems. I also learned how important it is to code and that fluency in at least one relevant computer language is very important.
  • I believe most astronomers spend most of their time working with data and not with telescopes themselves [...] I have not experienced working with real data on real ongoing research before. I think the experience gave me a better understanding of what be a scientist is actually about. Especially when I asked if something I had done was correct or not and the answer given was they did not know based on the fact that I was the one determining that and I had to back up what I had done.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2015 - IC417