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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:] Though I don’t like to admit it, I had certain expectations regarding the teachers and students on this trip. To be entirely honest, I was expecting them to be a bunch of socially awkward nerds. Therefore, I was quite surprised to find that everyone was actually very normal—funny, talkative, and knowledgeable on a wide range of topics spanning past simply astronomy. It was certainly refreshing, and it made me realize that I’d fallen victim to an unfortunate stereotype.
  • [student:] I was least surprised at the amount of trial and error and patience that was required as we began to delve into our data. It’s most definitely not a quick process!
  • [student:] The best thing about the trip was being able to be treated like a colleague rather than a student.
  • Truly, the value of this program is in the students, teachers and scientists working together as multi-level, multi-generational colleagues at Caltech. The content authority of a teacher is often strong, but the content authority of scientists is on a whole other level! And making a personal connection with a scientist raises the value of the student experience yet another magnitude.
  • [student:] I learned one very important thing about astronomy. I’d always had this romanticised picture in my head of astronomers gazing through telescopes at the night sky and making revolutionary discoveries left and right. Thus, this trip was a bit of a wake up call for me; I now know that astronomy involves a lot more spreadsheet work and data analysis before any life-changing discoveries can be made.

Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN