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Summer Visit - 2013 - C-CWEL

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-CWEL" team came to visit in August 2013. The core team educators attended, plus 11 students.

Quotes

  • Real astronomy is very exciting! I was not expecting to have to solve problems in excel the way we did. We were asked to answer simple questions or develop simple graphs at times but in order to get correct results (as far as we can tell) our team had to parse our skills and play with logic. I remember creating my first SED: I became so excited I could not sit down anymore. Another teacher was so thrilled they raised their hands and yelled in excitement. It was the first time we had results; it was a thrill.
  • Again, NITARP never fails to positively surprise me by changing my perception of astronomy and the scientific process in general. I have been blown away with the amount of work that, for our respective project, goes into reducing a tiny patch on the sky. There is so much to know and not enough time to learn everything - I understand what PhD really means and how astronomy explains the Universe.
  • I plan on continuing to share the project at [my institution[ in several forms. I will be able to explain how scientists get information from astronomical images and how we look at our data to determine we are discovering YSOs. I will share these processes with students in workshops, with public audiences and with colleagues.
  • [student: This experience changed the way I thought about astronomy.] Very much so – I figured out it is a competitive field, it really is fun, it is very different than the science we do in school (in a good way).
  • [student:] By understanding the information that SEDs were providing, I was able to draw conclusions about stars and say whether or not they could possibly be a YSO candidate and that's a pretty cool skill!

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2013 - C-CWEL