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Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN

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 HIPS AGN team came to visit in June 2016. The core team educators attended, plus 8 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] Though I don’t like to admit it, I had certain expectations regarding the teachers and students on this trip. To be entirely honest, I was expecting them to be a bunch of socially awkward nerds. Therefore, I was quite surprised to find that everyone was actually very normal—funny, talkative, and knowledgeable on a wide range of topics spanning past simply astronomy. It was certainly refreshing, and it made me realize that I’d fallen victim to an unfortunate stereotype.
  • [student:] Don’t be afraid to ask an ungodly amount of questions. And don’t be afraid to be wrong. I certainly was at first—like, pretty much all the time—but when I finally stopped worrying about it so much, I found I had all this extra room in my brain that I could devote entirely to learning why I was wrong, and how to be less wrong (because no one is ever really right—that’s just not how astronomy works).
  • Truly, the value of this program is in the students, teachers and scientists working together as multi-level, multi-generational colleagues at Caltech. The content authority of a teacher is often strong, but the content authority of scientists is on a whole other level! And making a personal connection with a scientist raises the value of the student experience yet another magnitude.
  • I don’t feel that this work could have been completed online. The teachers did come up with a procedure, but we abandoned it once we were all together and working because we could communicate more effectively in real-time. We could read one another’s body language and quickly play off of others’ ideas. We could also work on different sub-projects concurrently with others and thus get more work done in a shorter time period.
  • It would have been really difficult to do this online. The group was able to get through a lot of material in only a week—it would have taken many weeks to have done this using some sort of online method. We even discovered that one of our techniques was not going to give us enough sources and so we changed our procedure then and there—it would have taken much longer to have come to that conclusion and have reacted to it had we not been talking things over together as we went.

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Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN