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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:] The most valuable lesson I took from the NITARP summer visit was how to successfully collaborate with a large group of people.
  • [student:] Although I knew coming into the program that there would be other schools working with us, I did not expect friendships to be formed from our collaboration, and was pleasantly surprised when they were.
  • Our group included students, teachers, and a scientist, and we were all engaged in a common goal. As a teacher, the classroom experience so often involves telling the students what to do and then having them do it. It is refreshing to have a chance to work with the students on a project that isn't predetermined.
  • [..] I’m familiar with tackling problems, creating potential solutions, testing them, and re-iterating the process. Research is sort of the opposite in that implementing a solution is not the goal, but rather to learn things we didn’t know before. This polarity between engineering and science was never clearer than during this entire project. This lack of planning or organization in the research process made me somewhat uncomfortable.
  • [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.

Summer Visit - 2014 - SIRXS