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Summer Visit - 2022 - fIRes

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 fIRes team came to visit in July 2022. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 9 students.

Quotes

  • This experience continued to remind me of why I love astronomy. The opportunity to work at this level with a mentor astrophysicist and share it with my students is just incredible. There is no other opportunity like it.
  • Astronomers must have a strong work ethic and be able to persevere through challenges. Astronomers must develop creative solutions to problems and be able to ask questions, including questions that arise as they work through data. They must be good at distinguishing patterns.
  • Though I've been teaching and preaching [the scientific method] for years, this is really the first time I've honestly done it (with A LOT of help and guidance, of course).
  • the fact that someone, somewhere (namely, you who write the grants and those that fund them) valued what we do and thought we were worthy of some extra investment, made me feel more effective and more confident and made me think forward to additional opportunities and accomplishments, rather than being saddled with the day-to-day deadlines and targets that typically dominate a teacher's thinking.
  • The importance of building a team relationship is the key to success. The benefits of working together at Caltech include being able to immediately receive feedback from the mentor astrophysicist and the other participants as well as being able to ask questions that occur organically in the midst of a conversation.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - fIRes