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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

  • The most surprising thing [to me] was being left for a day to just work together and try to put everything we learned together in a reasonable way. It was very helpful, just surprising. Also that we used trigonometry!
  • [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.
  • [student:] The most surprising thing for me was the fact that NITARP is truly, to my knowledge, a great example of an actual research opportunity. I say this because with every other school-based trip I’ve done, there’s always been a strict itinerary that told us where we would learn, what we would learn, who we would learn with, etc. But, NITARP was different than those other trips in a way where I felt more independent which, again to my knowledge, is a perfect representation of a real research opportunity.
  • Astronomy is imagination powered by math and inspired by the sky. I am surprised and delighted at the sheer volume of data available and all the opportunity hidden inside it.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights