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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

  • I don’t think what we did at CA could have been accomplished online. We needed to be able to point and write on a side board and look at each other’s work. Yes, these things can technically be done online, but the time lost to setting up or executing those simple tasks makes it prohibitive to actually being productive and having real whole group interactivity.
  • [student:] The work carried out over the trip most definitely couldn’t have been done with the same effectiveness had it been done online. Having that face to face contact, learning alongside of your fellow researchers, being able to compare work then and there, and being able to ask questions as they come is something that you just can’t quite replicate over the Internet or a telephone.
  • “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:] I think the two most important qualities in any astronomer are hard work and passion. Hard work is necessary in constantly building the knowledge base required to succeed, and passion is necessary in providing the intrinsic motivation required to succeed.
  • [student:] I now understand that astronomers don’t send spacecrafts to Jupiter simply to blow the minds of children—that’s just a side effect of the greater purpose.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN