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Summer Visit - 2012 - C-WAYS

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 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 C-WAYS team came to visit in July 2012. The core team educators attended, plus 12 students, and two additional scientists.  Dr. JD Armstrong (LCOGT/UH) and Dr. Babar Ali (IPAC) also assissted.

Quotes

  • The entire experience was "real astronomy." Nothing was canned. None of us in the room knew what the "final answer" was. Students really buy into the fact that this is real research.
  • Probably the most interesting thing I learned was that astronomers are more detectives piecing the universe together. Since we cannot actually see the life cycle of a star, we are forced to look at stars in different points in their (unfathomably long) lives and match them up in sequential order. Most importantly, "real science" is nothing like "textbook science" where we have explicit directions and there is a definite right or wrong answer. In the real world of science, we have to trust ourselves that we have done our best to reach the answer we deem correct.
  • This has made me re-think what I want to do in college and my future.
  • The most important thing I did was learn.
  • So far, this experience has greatly changed the way I thought about astronomy. It made me realize just how much work really goes into all of the things you see. It also helped me get an idea of what it really means to be an astronomer; it's not just sitting at a telescope taking beautiful pictures.

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Summer Visit - 2012 - C-WAYS