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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

  • 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.
  • [The most surprising thing I learned was that] Science can legitimately be somewhat subjective. When we were trying to classify objects, we had limited data to make that classification from. In some cases, it was difficult to say “it’s an AGN” or “it’s a YSO,” especially if we were looking at an SED with only two data points on it. I’d always thought of science as having a right or wrong and didn’t give much thought to non-numerical uncertainty.
  • “Real astronomy” is trying to figure out what makes the universe tick—it involves lots of people, working in teams, reducing data and trying to figure out what it means. Sometimes the data comes from a large database and sometimes the astronomer collects it himself (or herself). Regardless of how the data was collected, that was the easy part—the real challenge is analyzing it and deciphering what it means.
  • I don’t think what we did at CA could have been accomplished online. We needed to be able to point and write on a side board and look at each other’s work. Yes, these things can technically be done online, but the time lost to setting up or executing those simple tasks makes it prohibitive to actually being productive and having real whole group interactivity.
  • [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