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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

  • [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.
  • The least surprising was that there are really smart people working at Caltech. I thought that the visit from the other IPAC staff, Luisa's thoughtful guidance during the week, as well as Varoujan's JPL tour, showed this in spades.
  • I appreciate knowing that astronomers celebrate their “geekiness” and their families. I believe that point alone squelches many preconceived notions. Not only did it change how I understand astronomers but how others understand astronomers. The look on people’s faces when I talk about the Caltech astronomer and how *she* is guiding us through the research process, is extremely telling. I think it is easy to point the finger at others when they profile astronomers as “old white guys in lab coats” but I am afraid I may have also held that misinformed preconceived notion.
  • My favorite thing about this kind of work is the ways that different people demonstrate mastery at different moments in ways that you can’t predict ahead of time.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - IDYL