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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

  • Another moment of frustration involved several hours of calculations based on misinterpretation of data and formulas. It was a wonderfully humbling learning experience for all of us involved. The student especially seemed to appreciate seeing their teachers hit the dead end and have to do an about face.
  • [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.
  • [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.
  • [student:] The most surprising thing for me on this trip was learning about how multi-faceted the field of astronomy is. I had never realized that there were so many different paths you could follow in this area. It was especially cool to hear from all of the speakers that were brought in because, although they all work in the same field, they all had such different careers and areas of focus and research.
  • Team build, team build, team build. The work is so much more successful and enjoyable if you build the trust.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2015 - LADDT