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Summer Visit - 2014 - SIRXS

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 SIRXS team came to visit in July 2014. The core team educators attended, plus 11 students.

 

Quotes

  • One of the powerful elements to our successes was collaboration. While I have experienced this before and anticipated that it would be a key component of our work, I loved discovering that our students were often in the lead, helping the teachers and astronomers to solve problems.
  • [student:] It surprised me that so much astronomical data was available to the public. I was even more surprised by the fact that this was not just a little data, but it was so much that one would not be able to go through it all in a whole lifetime.
  • [the best thing about the trip was] Working with teachers and students. [Another teacher] and I actually shared curriculum for astronomy and bounced ideas off one another. The collaborating is priceless.
  • [student:] Yes, I was under the impression that astronomy wasn’t a difficult scientific field to study and that astronomy deals mainly with planets. But now, I can see that there is so much more to astronomy than just planets. There are a lot of unknowns and to study astronomy you need a strong and talented brain. You also need patience, focus, and passion for it.
  • For me, the most important aspect of our trip was not only nailing down the details of our project, but being invited to participate in all of those decisions.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2014 - SIRXS