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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:] I most most surprised by my own capabilities at working on the project. Going into the week, I was worried about not being able to keep up with the workload and being unable to process the information. I was honestly shocked to see that the students as well as the mentors worked at a similar pace, asked the same kind of questions, and were learning alongside of each other, rather than the students just relaying everything done by our mentors.
  • [student:] I was surprised about how our procedure veered off from its original course[...]
  • There are lots of qualities that are important to an astronomer, but two that come to mind are persistence and diligence. Sometimes, the apparent path to solving a problem turns out to lead somewhere else (or not lead anywhere at all). The astronomer has to be aware of this and know when to change course and try another approach—sometimes, this has to be done over and over again before the research problem starts to show results.
  • “Real astronomy” is trying to figure out what makes the universe tick—it involves lots of people, working in teams, reducing data and trying to figure out what it means. Sometimes the data comes from a large database and sometimes the astronomer collects it himself (or herself). Regardless of how the data was collected, that was the easy part—the real challenge is analyzing it and deciphering what it means.
  • [student:] We understand that our work will not always work out, but giving up or becoming completely frustrated won’t change anything.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN