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Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 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 Cold Spotz team came to visit in June 2012. The core team educators plus 8 students attended.

Quotes

  • I was a little nervous initially about working with people I had never met before, but it turned out to be so much better than I could have expected.
  • I had anticipated the stress and frustration of trying to push the students and data further than we had before. While I felt our students were well prepared, there was a lot of information which we needed to digest and incorporate into our workflow, and young students are not always that quick on their feet when it comes to complicated procedures or conceptual reasoning. However, I felt the students did great and the challenge was appropriate.
  • I did not expect to use the internet as much as we did.
  • I am so surprised that after working my brain for many hours each day, I could understand what [we were talking about]. While I am a teacher and love astronomy, I am not up on all of the terms, and even [the] concepts that we used so readily. I am surprised that my brain clicked over and got is quickly (relatively speaking) and that by the end of the week, I too was speaking in these ways.
  • [student:] I always knew that astronomy was a bit more than just sitting around all night looking through telescopes, but I think it was really great to be able to see that there are so many different career paths and ways astronomy can be done. It made me realize that if I do decide to go into astronomy later on, that there are a lot of things I can do, whether it's dealing with computers, engineering, or traveling around the world.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz