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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

  • It would have been impossible for me to develop the depth of understanding I achieved about our project through telecons. I came to Caltech thinking I possessed a thorough understanding of our project, but quickly realized it had much more depth. We still have much analysis to do that I could not have done without direct supervision. I am much more confident now after having worked side by side with the LADDT crew. Correlating the filters and redshits is still at the edge of my conceptual field, but it is coming into focus thanks to the direct contact I experienced at Caltech.
  • It was important to work on the data together, as a large team—we were able to pair with new partners and better understand the questions we had.
  • [Real astronomy is] Lots of numbers and lots of math. I figures there would be calculations but not so much.
  • [student:] A sense of patience and endurance is what I think is important for astronomy. There are so many theories to test and most of them won’t be right but you just have to persevere through until you get good results.
  • [student:] When I was younger, I always imagined astronomy as looking through telescopes and counting stars. I now realized that this is definitely not "real astronomy." Real astronomy is theory and observation, or coming up with explanations for things in our universe and then analyzing data to prove or disprove those theories. Like Dr. Gorjian said, there are no answers in the back of the book.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2015 - LADDT