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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

  • [student:] I did this research project to kind of "dip my foot in the water" and see if it was a field I could consider going into. There was a specific moment on the third day, where I realized that we were in that room for like eight hours a day (longer than my school) and I was perfectly content doing it.
  • [student:] Astronomy isn’t a one-person job, it includes many people that will contribute their part to the project until it is complete.
  • We were all so different from each other, yet all so open to each other, all so open to making mistakes in front of each other, all so open to the messiness of true learning in front of each other and our kids. This was important and interesting.
  • [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.
  • [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.

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights