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Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP

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 SCHARP team came to visit in June 2023. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

Quotes

  • "Real astronomy" is using real data to analyze and make conclusions. Research is an iterative process in the sense that we get some answers that generate more questions. And we did that!
  • [student:] I was most surprised by how quickly much of the data we were given was processed in such a short amount of time, even when doing work "by hand." The SEDs, for instance, were expected to take a long time to complete, but even when doing them in Excel, my team was able to complete them very quickly.
  • [student:] The NITARP experience has certainly influenced my thoughts on college. Even though I am not considering majoring in astronomy-related fields, I think the research experience has ignited my passion for further participating in research in college or my future career.
  • [student:] I always thought astronomy was looking through telescopes, collecting data, and mapping stars. I never expected it to be creating graphs and doing math for them. I always knew you had to be really bright but I always thought you generally knew what you were looking at. I never thought you would be discovering worlds and stars that have never been looked at before and have to learn along the way.
  • [student:] The least surprising thing from this trip was the amount of information that we were given. I knew going in that there was going to be a lot of information to handle, but I was not anticipating the sheer amount that we were given, even on day one of working. There is a lot of hard-to-process data that goes into one very small, easily-understandable diagram.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP