• NASA
  • IPAC

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:] Real astronomy is hard. It’s a little bit of guessing, a lot of research and a whole lot of teamwork. [...] I knew that coming to Pasadena would mean that I would have amazing opportunities that I probably won’t get ever again, but I definitely wasn’t prepared for the amount of life changing science I would get handed.
  • [student:] I got to deal with the frustrations of being wrong and trying to figure things out, but I also saw the creative solutions people come up with to solve these problems. I also learned how important it is to code and that fluency in at least one relevant computer language is very important.
  • [student:] Granted none of this is easy, but I think it has made me a stronger learner as well.
  • [student:] I am also glad to say that whole reason why we are doing this makes more sense to me as a student. Before I knew what we were searching for but even then I didn’t realize how big of a deal it really was.
  • [student:] I thought that research would be isolating and that it wasn’t something I could see myself being interested in for long periods of time, but if I were able to work in a team like this one, I think I could imagine doing research later in life.

Summer Visit - 2015 - IC417