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Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights

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 Dust Mights team came to visit in July 2019. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 5 students.


Quotes

  • [student:] Real astronomy is a lot of work. It takes a lot of effort to learn and know what you need to do. It also takes a lot of creativity. It amazes me that we were able to figure out not just how to do things, but what to even do next. I expected to have to figure things out, but it was really interesting to have to figure out what to figure out.
  • [student:] The best part of the trip was just the full experience that it brought. Getting to sit in a room and feel like I was contributing something to humanity's knowledge was just so unique.
  • [student:] I did this research project to kind of "dip my foot in the water" and see if it was a field I could consider going into. There was a specific moment on the third day, where I realized that we were in that room for like eight hours a day (longer than my school) and I was perfectly content doing it.
  • The most surprising thing [to me] was being left for a day to just work together and try to put everything we learned together in a reasonable way. It was very helpful, just surprising. Also that we used trigonometry!
  • [student:] Astronomy isn’t a one-person job, it includes many people that will contribute their part to the project until it is complete.

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights