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Summer Visit - 2019 - IDYL

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 IDYL team came to visit in July-August 2019. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 5 students.

Quotes

  • It hasn’t really changed the way I think about astronomy but it has given me a much larger appreciation for all the work that goes in to the research that astronomers do on a daily basis.
  • The second most important and interesting thing was being able to work with EVERYONE in the group. The collaboration between the members of our team was awesome. It was very nice to be in the same room working together to figure things out. I think our team completed a lot of work this week but it really didn’t seem like work because we all came together as a cohesive group. I [..] do not think we could have accomplished so much in just a few short days with just zoom meetings and email.
  • [student:] I know from our discussions that an astronomer has to be creative. They have to think outside of the box to do work that has never been done before. I think they also need to be extremely patient. It takes a long time and a lot of hard [work] to do astronomy research and I constantly found myself impatient to move onto the next thing.
  • [student:] While learning so much was definitely a huge part of this trip, I would say the best thing about the trip would be the teamwork. To get all of us in the same room to work on this research and bounce ideas off of each other was truly amazing. It was great to have a team that was dedicated to the same goal and we were all passionate about what we would do with this newfound knowledge and research when it is all said and done.
  • [student:] I think for me the most surprising thing I learned was that I was able to do and understand a lot of what we learned this past week. Going into the week I was really nervous that everything was going to go over my head, but it didn't, and that was pretty exciting.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - IDYL