• NASA
  • IPAC

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

  • [student:] My NITARP participation has strengthened my goal of studying STEM in college. I hope to major in a field like astrophysics or biophysics with the inspiration that NITARP has given me. Having the chance to do this type of advanced research at such an early age was a special opportunity that I will take with me to college and beyond.
  • [student:] The most surprising thing that I learned was how much more there is to astronomy than meets the eye. You are not just looking at stars through a telescope. You are graphing data, and doing math to better understand what you are looking at.
  • I have an even greater appreciation of astronomy and astronomers because of this experience. To be able to make inferences and calculations from things basically intangible and find the possibilities in this research is really “out of this world”!
  • [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.
  • I think [this experience] helped me realize and experience how much work [astronomers] do and how many different tools get used. I liked experiencing the "huh, that's weird" moment when we found something neat.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP