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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

  • [student:] The most surprising thing that happened was the several occasions where I discovered that I actually understood what was going on. The little "ah ha!" moments were really exciting and unexpected for me, as the material was so complicated and so unlike anything else I had learned in school.
  • The most surprising thing that I learned was that I could finally look at the data we were dealing with and make sense of it.
  • [student:] The best thing about the trip was being able to expand my knowledge about space and because of that being able to narrow down on a career.
  • 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.
  • This experience completely changed my views on astronomy. The biggest shock for me was when I found out that astronomer don't actually sit in an observatory and look out a telescope all day. It's gotten more complex then that now, but that image of a person in a white lab coat looking through a huge telescope was the image that used to pop into my head when I hear the word astronomy.

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Summer Visit - 2012 - ColdSpotz