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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

  • [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:] The most important/interesting thing I learned was that engineering is more creative than I ever thought. I learned how to do actual research, which was super useful, but going to the JPL and seeing the products of science and engineering together opened my mind to the possibility of being an engineer.
  • [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.
  • [student:] I saw that you have to be patient with the sometimes tedious work you have to carry out and when things go wrong, but you also have to be creative to solve your problems and come up with ways to be efficient.
  • [student:] The best thing about this trip was when Luisa was presenting a slide show to us and said, “Remember. There is no answer in the back of the book. This has never been done before. So do it right.” It really opened my eyes as to the immense amount of responsibility and trust was being put on us high school kids. I’m barely halfway through my educational career and there has never been a time where someone, somewhere, didn’t have a cheat sheet or answer code. It’s completely humbling and uplifting to have to do your own work, with the knowledge that you are in a building where people do it every day and love it.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2015 - IC417