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Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt

The summer visit to Caltech is 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 Cosmic dIRt team came to visit in June 2018. The core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] I think that the most important quality for an astronomer to have other than the obvious (intelligence, writes well, etc.) is perseverance. Because no matter how smart you are or how much research you have done, eventually you will get to the point where there is something that you simply just don't understand. However, being an astronomer means pushing through those difficulties and working at the problem until you have solved it, which is exactly what perseverance is.
  • I feel like my kids developed a much deeper understanding of the subject material by having the discussions we did and practicing with the group. It was really cool to see how the kids all came and worked together on this project. I think that bonding experience will help make the research easier since we are more comfortable with each other, it will be easier to share ideas and speak up when something doesn't feel quite right.
  • Watching my own [students] struggle with material and rise to the occasion made me proud of them and reinforced why I do this job in the first place.
  • [...] it was so much fun talking about science incessantly in a world where that isn't always socially appropriate.
  • [student:] I feel like I have a better understanding of what astronomers actually do. I had previously been confused what astronomers actually do, but I now know that they are working all the time to follow interesting things and broaden our understanding of space. I also did not realize how much they work with a variety of different scientists when working on projects.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt