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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:] I now understand that astronomers don’t send spacecrafts to Jupiter simply to blow the minds of children—that’s just a side effect of the greater purpose.
  • [student:] The best thing about the trip was being able to be treated like a colleague rather than a student.
  • I wasn’t expecting as many “well, let’s try this” side roads. I thought the process would be more linear, but this felt more authentic somehow. You don’t know the answer, and you don’t have a clear roadmap for finding the answer, but you have some background and can use that to start reaching towards an answer.
  • [student:] Even though I had to redo my work over 10 times, this still strengthened my skills and provided me extreme happiness in my efforts. I did receive a lot of help from both the students and the teachers. I also provided this same amount of health back to team members. Everyone was a big help rather than just one person.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN