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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 honestly thought that “real astronomy” or “real research opportunity” meant fetching coffee or doing busy work for professionals. However, this thankfully turned out to be untrue. I really thought as if I were an integral part of the operation and the entire astronomy community because I was doing actual work in identifying and studying interesting stars with disks, dust, etc. I felt I was doing “real” integral work.
  • I believe [this] was my students’ first experience of true intellectual work. And they loved it. On returning home, it was the first thing one of them told their parents about, right there in the airport next to baggage claim. It was also a topic of self-initiated conversation I overheard the kids talking about among themselves. In other words, NITARP gave them their first "braingasm," their first experience of amazing pleasure that comes after hard thinking. An essential experience at the heart of the intrinsic motivation that will carry these kids through their studies and professional lives. I can’t thank you enough for this.
  • The training in the classroom (and Varoujan’s method of teaching it to us) was invaluable. The individual work and telecons have been helpful for setting a baseline, but learning [...] and being all in one room together to get our misconceptions worked out has really increased my confidence in the work we are doing.
  • We had so much fun looking for interesting ways to parse the data to look for interesting subsets of our data to investigate. You could actually feel the excitement in the room.
  • [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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights