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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

  • My advice for teachers is to be willing to take the risk of learning side-by-side with your students. Likely every teacher is reluctant to do this, but if you can get over the initial anxiety, the rewards are great for yourself, your students, and even your school’s culture.
  • 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:] 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.
  • [The best thing about the trip was] I felt like an actual researcher, and it was incredible seeing our results in real time.
  • 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