• NASA
  • IPAC

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:] The work we did was intense, and I would be lying if I said I did not get confused more times than I would like to admit. However, being a part of a group was very helpful and I felt like we were a pretty good team. We helped each other figure it out.
  • [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.
  • 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.
  • 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 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - IDYL