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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 think qualities that are most important to for an astronomer to have are determination, focus, willfulness, and perseverance.
  • 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:] Usually, in class, teachers have all the answers and just tell you, but with this project, the teachers didn’t always have the answers. Sometimes, students explained things to the teachers. It was interesting to work with teachers as equals.
  • [student:] The most valuable lesson I took from the NITARP summer visit was how to successfully collaborate with a large group of people.
  • Being at Caltech also changed my relationship with my students, and in a way that I had hoped for. The limits of my expertise were much more obvious to them. This meant that they had to find other ways to answer questions than reflexively turning to me. We developed more of a sense of being peers in terms of our work together on the project.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2014 - SIRXS