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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:] The most surprising thing for me on this trip was learning about how multi-faceted the field of astronomy is. I had never realized that there were so many different paths you could follow in this area. It was especially cool to hear from all of the speakers that were brought in because, although they all work in the same field, they all had such different careers and areas of focus and research.
  • [student:] I never really considered pursuing a career in astronomy or astrophysics beforehand, but after doing real scientific work with the subject matter, hearing speakers from this field, and touring facilities like JPL, astronomy and astrophysics has suddenly become so much more intriguing to me. It was great to have this "real-world" scientific experience.
  • [student:] It was easier working together [in person] because we could divide the work and compare. The group grew really close.
  • I was most surprised by the technical depth of our project. I thought I had a good understanding coming in to the June workshop, but I was just at the surface. We were literally drawn deeper into the black holes! I also have greatly increased my skills with Excel.
  • [student:] A sense of patience and endurance is what I think is important for astronomy. There are so many theories to test and most of them won’t be right but you just have to persevere through until you get good results.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2015 - LADDT