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Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN

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 HIPS AGN team came to visit in June 2016. The core team educators attended, plus 8 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] This experience really normalized astronomers as people for me. I always felt that I was never smart enough to be an astronomer, and it was too out of reach for me. But it was so nice to see that everyone faced similar struggles as myself. This experiences helped solidify my goals of working in the field of astronomy, and made the dream seem much more feasible.
  • [student:] The work carried out over the trip most definitely couldn’t have been done with the same effectiveness had it been done online. Having that face to face contact, learning alongside of your fellow researchers, being able to compare work then and there, and being able to ask questions as they come is something that you just can’t quite replicate over the Internet or a telephone.
  • There are lots of qualities that are important to an astronomer, but two that come to mind are persistence and diligence. Sometimes, the apparent path to solving a problem turns out to lead somewhere else (or not lead anywhere at all). The astronomer has to be aware of this and know when to change course and try another approach—sometimes, this has to be done over and over again before the research problem starts to show results.
  • I don’t feel that this work could have been completed online. The teachers did come up with a procedure, but we abandoned it once we were all together and working because we could communicate more effectively in real-time. We could read one another’s body language and quickly play off of others’ ideas. We could also work on different sub-projects concurrently with others and thus get more work done in a shorter time period.
  • [student:] Messing up is a huge part of being anything in the sciences. There might be times where you will get it the first time, but that only means you are lucky.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN