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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:] Seeing people be so passionate about learning something they love and that interests them really inspired me and let me understand why so many people have chosen to pursue astronomy. Plus, I learned that most astronomers are secretly very dorky (the good kind, I promise ☺) and will gladly talk with you about anything “nerdy” (i.e. Star Wars, Doctor Who, etc.)
  • [student:] A good deal of the information was difficult to process despite relearning it each day. However, it was extremely rewarding when I finally did begin to understand—which was another thing that surprised me. *I* understood college-level astronomy.
  • 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.
  • [student:] I think the two most important qualities in any astronomer are hard work and passion. Hard work is necessary in constantly building the knowledge base required to succeed, and passion is necessary in providing the intrinsic motivation required to succeed.
  • I thought that science has a right or wrong answer. And it still does, the object is either an AGN or a YSO (probably). But given the limited data we have sometimes, we just don’t know and have to make a reasonable guess as to what the right answer is. It gives me a much better appreciation for astronomers who made “wrong” conclusions based on limited data.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2016 - HIPS AGN