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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

  • 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.
  • [Doing science is] both easier and harder than I expected. It’s easier in that, we used the same skills I teach my students around work hard, think carefully, document your work
  • [student:] The most interesting thing we did on the trip was visit JPL. I was amazed by how much was being done there and I felt like it really confirmed that I wanted to work at a place like that.
  • [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.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt