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Summer Visit - 2015 - LADDT

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 LADDT team came to visit in June 2015. The core team educators attended, plus 14 students.

Quotes

  • The visit seemed absolutely crucial to me because the time we spend in person is about ten times as productive and meaningful as the time spent on telecons and over e-mail. There is something about being in a room together that really pushed out understanding and work forward tremendously.
  • The most important part of the program for me was the reiteration of the science behind our research. We wrote a proposal and thought that we understood the science and then were amazed every day that there was some nuance to the science that we hadn’t caught yet.
  • [Real astronomy is] Lots of numbers and lots of math. I figures there would be calculations but not so much.
  • One of the big benefits was how quickly our depth of understanding increased just by being able to talk to each other and work together. Personally, I would not have been able to think as deeply as I did without the in person interaction and conversations over lunch.
  • [student:] The most surprising thing to me was how well we all got along and could work together from the very beginning of the project, I very much enjoyed meeting everyone on the team.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2015 - LADDT