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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

  • [student:] I did not expect how much improvisation had to be done. I knew that there would be many issues in dealing with the data we had, and we did not have solutions to all those problems before hand, but I did not expect just how many caveats had to be worked out.
  • [student:] Astronomy is not just a mechanical way of doing things. It also involves culture and personality. Learning these is only possible by meeting another astronomer.
  • [student:] Real astronomy is the study of the universe. We did a lot of computer work and this didn’t match up with my expectation of scientific research. This type of research is very technical and I realized how the use of computers is invaluable.
  • 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.
  • [student:] The best part [of the trip] was seeing how the project changed so much over just a few days. Although our end goal was the same, our process to reach that goal was changed in those few days. From things as simple as just finding new ways to cut down the source count from the SEIP to things as radical as finding a brand new program online to sort the data, the project was constantly evolving.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2014 - SIRXS