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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:] Cool research doesn’t always require incredibly complicated math/science.
  • [student:] I didn't expect astronomy to have so much computing in it. It makes sense now, because it would be hard to talk to space telescopes and rovers without them.
  • 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.
  • Our group is absolutely changed [by the summer visit], especially in terms of engagement from the kids who are now absolutely psyched and won’t stop texting me about wanting to do more research.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2018 - Cosmic DIRt