• NASA
  • IPAC

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

  • [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:] When we first started working on learning the science behind our project, I felt doubtful of my own abilities and my previous knowledge. I was the only rising junior out of the students, and because I had never taken an astronomy course, or a math course that dealt with logarithms, I assumed that I wouldn’t be able to understand, and that I would be alone in this. However, I was supported by all participants, soon realizing that we were all in it together, and was able to gain an significant understanding of the material.
  • For teachers it can be hard to let yourself not know things in front of the kids but it is even harder to let yourself be wrong; accept that this is part of the experience.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt