• NASA
  • IPAC

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

  • I was pleasantly surprised at the mature behavior and intellectual level of the student participants. They have taken the work seriously, enjoyed the out of work time activities and gained an incredible new network of resources for their future career endeavors. The students make excellent partners for learning and are highly able to acquire new skills. When partnered with more careful and experienced researchers, they can move through large data sets with ease, and accuracy. They are more easily frustrated by errors and do not have training in trouble shooting and meta-cognition that can let them solve more problems alone.
  • [student:] I was surprised by the wonderful people on the team who had flown in from different places around the country. I did not anticipate being part of such a large group but it as a pleasant surprise.
  • [student:] I thought that scientific research would be complex and complicated, but this exceeds that to a whole new level.
  • 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] made me realize that the astronomy shows I love to watch are way, way, way simplified. Real astronomy requires a deeper understanding of math and many other sciences as well as a ton of persistence. It also made me realize that most astronomers don't spend all of their nights looking through a telescope. A lot of astronomers receive data from a telescope and then spend months analyzing that data.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2013 - C-CWEL