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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.
  • 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.
  • “Real astronomy” is like detective work. It requires gathering the available evidence, integrating it, and following it where it leads.
  • Getting to work with people who are genuinely interested in science research and want to talk about it as much as I do was fantastic.
  • [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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt