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Summer Visit - 2015 - LADDT

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 LADDT team came to visit in June 2015. The core team educators attended, plus 14 students.

Quotes

  • To truly make this a successful collaborative effort between all of the teachers and all of the students and to get the commitment to the project it is vital that everyone meet in the same place and work together on site.
  • [student: Real astronomers] have to be willing to feel stupid or dumb at times. This program really showed us that you're going to mess up and that its okay. Sometimes your data will be wrong or you worked a problem wrong. It is going to be okay. You can't always expect the right answer on the first try.
  • [student:] The most surprising thing to me was how well we all got along and could work together from the very beginning of the project, I very much enjoyed meeting everyone on the team.
  • Another moment of frustration involved several hours of calculations based on misinterpretation of data and formulas. It was a wonderfully humbling learning experience for all of us involved. The student especially seemed to appreciate seeing their teachers hit the dead end and have to do an about face.
  • [student:] The most interesting thing that I learned was just how many different jobs there are in the field of astronomy and how they all can work together or separately on different projects.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2015 - LADDT