• NASA
  • IPAC

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 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.
  • 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:] 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:] The best part of the trip was just the full experience that it brought. Getting to sit in a room and feel like I was contributing something to humanity's knowledge was just so unique.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - Dust Mights