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Summer Visit - 2015 - IC417

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 IC417 team came to visit in June 2015. The core team educators attended, plus 8 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] This for sure changed the way I think about astronomy because I knew there was a lot of work involved but I didn’t think there would be so much time on one topic or aspect at a time. It took us almost a whole week just to examine the SED’s. So I can’t imagine what the whole process must be. We are still going to be examining when we get back to our homes.
  • [student:] Granted none of this is easy, but I think it has made me a stronger learner as well.
  • [student:] I think real astronomy is going through all the research you may have had in the archives or new data you got, and taking it and learning from it. Still with the scientific research I am surprised how much the scientist really trusts us with it, and how she lets us work hands on with true scientific research.
  • I believe most astronomers spend most of their time working with data and not with telescopes themselves [...] I have not experienced working with real data on real ongoing research before. I think the experience gave me a better understanding of what be a scientist is actually about. Especially when I asked if something I had done was correct or not and the answer given was they did not know based on the fact that I was the one determining that and I had to back up what I had done.
  • [student:] I saw that you have to be patient with the sometimes tedious work you have to carry out and when things go wrong, but you also have to be creative to solve your problems and come up with ways to be efficient.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2015 - IC417