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Summer Visit - 2011 - TRS team

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.

Team Red Shift came to visit in August 2011. The team's core educators plus 5 students attended.

Quotes

  • When I presented the project to my School Board, they were really excited about the research and that I would be involving students the entire way.
  • I was really surprised by how much astronomers need to know about writing programs and fixing software when it doesn't 'play nice'. I think this more than anything else surprised me about what real astronomy is and what it is about.
  • ...analyzing images doesn't seem that difficult anymore.
  • [The best thing about the trip was that] there are only a handful of people at home that I can speak to about astronomy, physics, and the like, so I was absolutely thrilled by the people I got to meet. Being surrounded by people at least as intelligent and oftentimes far more so is quite the exhilarating experience.
  • What would be surprising to me is if everything would have gone according to plan. That just doesn't happen in science. So when bugs came up in the data analysis process, it felt very normal.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2011 - TRS team