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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 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.
  • There are many qualities that are important to an astronomer, but two of them 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.
  • It would have been really difficult to do this online. The group was able to get through a lot of material and get our workflow procedure worked out in only a week—it would have taken many weeks to have done this using some sort of online method.
  • [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.
  • [...] the community of teachers has been an unexpected and positive outcome of this program. I text the other physics teachers all the time to be like "hey, how do you teach this?" and then we chat about it. We also chat about our lives and things non NITARP/ teaching. Seeing these teachers in person was like a visit with my favorite science pen pals who live parallel lives in other states.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt