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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:] The best thing about the trip was being able to be treated like a colleague rather than a student.
  • [student:] I think this will be a common answer, but meeting with the rest of the team was an amazing experience that I know made us more open to sharing ideas with each other, enthusiastic about the work we're doing, and willing to put in effort to learn about/advance the project. The kind of collaboration possible with all of us in one room together was much better than anything online. It allowed us to fire out ideas easily, try different paths out at once, and work quickly.
  • [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).
  • On a related and extremely important front, even if some of the kids don’t become scientists, they will understand that the best of adult work is fun.
  • I wasn’t expecting as many “well, let’s try this” side roads. I thought the process would be more linear, but this felt more authentic somehow. You don’t know the answer, and you don’t have a clear roadmap for finding the answer, but you have some background and can use that to start reaching towards an answer.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN