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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

  • [student: Real astronomy is] Not being afraid to mess up and writing every step you do.
  • 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:] This experience definitely changed my preexisting views of astronomy. Beforehand, I never really thought about how many different things you could do in the field, and after participating in this program, I learned a lot about some possible career paths.
  • [student:] I was not surprised that the data wasn’t perfect on the first plot we made, and that it takes many more tries and many combinations if you want to find something that you can use to support your hypothesis.
  • [student:] Some of the graphs and charts confused me at some point, but I was eventually able to work through it once it was explained to me. The support system that we had as a whole was amazing. If I got confused at any point someone would help me. Mostly the teachers helped with the information as a whole, but many students helped with my problems with excel.

Summer Visit - 2015 - LADDT