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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

  • This experience certainly has changed my thoughts about astronomy and astronomers. I really did not know what they did except teach college classes. I enjoyed seeing the less formal and family friendly atmosphere at Spitzer. This experience will be shared with my students for some time.
  • [student:] The best thing about this trip was when Luisa was presenting a slide show to us and said, “Remember. There is no answer in the back of the book. This has never been done before. So do it right.” It really opened my eyes as to the immense amount of responsibility and trust was being put on us high school kids. I’m barely halfway through my educational career and there has never been a time where someone, somewhere, didn’t have a cheat sheet or answer code. It’s completely humbling and uplifting to have to do your own work, with the knowledge that you are in a building where people do it every day and love it.
  • [student:] This has for sure changed what I thought about astronomy, especially engineering. I respect what they do a lot more because none of it is easy. And I learned that you can’t have astronomy without the engineers to help them get them where they want to go.
  • Several of my students have started rethinking their educational paths/choices (thinking more towards something relating to their experiences from this summer.)
  • [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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2015 - IC417