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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 most interesting part of my experience was how well our student teams bonded to successfully work, and play, together. It was amazing and an important display of cooperative learning. They did not hesitate to help each other as well as the teachers.
  • [student:] I thought working together at Caltech enabled us to become more comfortable with one another and we were able to work together and share ideas and collaborate which made our time and our work more meaningful. We could communicate about which combinations worked or didn’t work or tips about excel. After the visit, I think the group bonded quite a bit and now we’re a much more cohesive team than before the trip.
  • [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.
  • Astronomy is pretty much all about the math so you better be good at it.
  • [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