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Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights

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 Dust Mights team came to visit in July 2019. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 5 students.


Quotes

  • We got a chance to share in astronomer’s sense of satisfaction as we problem solved and experienced success in choosing a path to follow in our investigation.
  • [student:] This completely changed my view of astronomy and astronomers because I had this unrealistic idea that they just sat in an observatory all day looking at planets and stars and wrote down what they found, published it, and called it a day.
  • [student:] Astronomy isn’t a one-person job, it includes many people that will contribute their part to the project until it is complete.
  • [student:] I think over the week people got more comfortable with asking more questions to figure out what they were confused about, or just more comfortable to speak up about other things outside of the Caltech portion of the trip.
  • [student:] The best thing, in my opinion, about the trip would be going out of my comfort zone and meeting new people in a new place. I definitely have made lots of friends and have learned to expand my horizons and push myself to do things I might not want to do. That has helped me learn a lot about the world and people around me and has forced me to grow up a little bit.

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights