• NASA
  • IPAC

Summer Visit - 2022 - SNAG490

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 SNAG490 team came to visit in June-July 2022. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 5 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] I feel stupid a lot of the time when doing this work and it felt reassuring to hear Luisa say that it's okay.
  • The major thing [I learned] is that astronomers or any scientist all have moments of feeling "stupid" and you should push through it. Also you do not need to have astronomy backgrounds to work in the career field if you are a coder for example.
  • [the most surprising thing] was how much the people at JPL, IPAC, and Caltech in general seemed to really like their jobs!
  • Astronomy is not really what I thought it would be. It is much more computer programming and data analysis than I realized. It is still interesting, just not what I expected at all. Which is good, actually, because I am really learning a lot.
  • I think in order to be an astronomer you have to be smart, hard working, and really like data. You also need to know computer programming. And, based on what everyone on that Zoom call said, you need to be good at working on a team. There is more teamwork than I would have guessed.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - SNAG490