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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:] 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.
  • [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.
  • 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:] 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.
  • One happy surprise was the element of serendipity in moving the project forward. I did not anticipate that one of the two post-docs who were sitting in to observe (for education, not science) would suggest that we use software that would change the way we managed our data.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2014 - SIRXS