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Summer Visit - 2014 - HG-WELS

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 HG-WELS team came to visit in July 2014. The core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

 

Quotes

  • [student:] Before this trip, I thought that astronomers looked through telescopes much more than I thought.
  • I am surprised with where our analysis has brought us thus far. I know the results are going a very different direction than expected, but I think that's awesome and it's a cool feeling knowing we have already begun to find results that potentially debunk former ones—not bad for a few students and teachers!
  • [student: Being in person at Caltech was important because] It also helped to have someone explain why we were doing each step and its significance for our overall project. It was also nice to have someone there to check your work and troubleshoot with you if something looks off.
  • [student:] Qualities important for an astronomer: You must be able to communicate with people in order to get things done, you need to be able to focus, you need to be good at math (yes you do), and you need to be able to analyze things and solve problems. When things go wrong, you gotta be a good sport.
  • [student:] One of the best things about the trip was really getting to look through the data and make the graphs, so that the results of our study were visually apparent. It was like the ‘Aha!’ moment.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2014 - HG-WELS