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Summer Visit - 2016 - LLAMMa

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 LLAMMa team came to visit in July 2016. The 3 core team educators attended, plus 11 students.

Quotes

  • Overall, *all* of my experiences with real scientists, especially those who work in the field to collect data, contradict the simple model of the hypothesis-experiment-conclusion that textbooks taught me and (attempt) to teach students even to this day.
  • [student:] I think that patience and dedication are important for an astronomer because astronomy is a long process. I think that being able to communicate and ask for help are also extremely important because astronomy includes a lot of people looking at the same thing and seeing different details that need to be shared.
  • [student:] I think it was way better that we did everything in person because we got to meet everybody and it was much easier to ask questions and learn from the questions of others. The group changed as we got to know each other and we all became friends.
  • [student:] When the group of people came in and talked to us about how they got there I was pretty excited. It was really cool to see the different ways a person could practice astronomy.
  • I wasn’t sure exactly what else, besides looking through telescopes, astronomers really did. I see now that a lot of astronomy can be done without being near any instruments that collect the data!

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2016 - LLAMMa