• NASA
  • IPAC

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

  • 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:] Some of the graphs and charts confused me at some point, but I was eventually able to work through it once it was explained to me. The support system that we had as a whole was amazing. If I got confused at any point someone would help me. Mostly the teachers helped with the information as a whole, but many students helped with my problems with excel.
  • Astronomy is pretty much all about the math so you better be good at it.
  • [student:] I was not surprised that the data wasn’t perfect on the first plot we made, and that it takes many more tries and many combinations if you want to find something that you can use to support your hypothesis.
  • 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.

Summer Visit - 2015 - LADDT