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Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt

The summer visit to Caltech is 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 Cosmic dIRt team came to visit in June 2018. The core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] When we first started working on learning the science behind our project, I felt doubtful of my own abilities and my previous knowledge. I was the only rising junior out of the students, and because I had never taken an astronomy course, or a math course that dealt with logarithms, I assumed that I wouldn’t be able to understand, and that I would be alone in this. However, I was supported by all participants, soon realizing that we were all in it together, and was able to gain an significant understanding of the material.
  • [student:] I didn't expect astronomy to have so much computing in it. It makes sense now, because it would be hard to talk to space telescopes and rovers without them.
  • Watching my own [students] struggle with material and rise to the occasion made me proud of them and reinforced why I do this job in the first place.
  • “Real astronomy” is like detective work. It requires gathering the available evidence, integrating it, and following it where it leads.
  • [...] the community of teachers has been an unexpected and positive outcome of this program. I text the other physics teachers all the time to be like "hey, how do you teach this?" and then we chat about it. We also chat about our lives and things non NITARP/ teaching. Seeing these teachers in person was like a visit with my favorite science pen pals who live parallel lives in other states.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt