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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 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.
  • I find it amazing that a group of individuals, from across the nation, with a variety of different backgrounds can cooperatively produce a research project in one year. I learned the research was not only about being able to master [..] the discipline but actively engage in group-supporting soft skills. I learned more about star formation and SEDs than I ever thought possible.
  • [student:] I was surprised at how excited I got when we finally came up with our first list of new YSO candidates. There was this electricity in the air and everyone felt very excited and relieved. I was also surprised at how fast the days went. Time seemed to fly by when we were working together.
  • Nothing really happened that I didn’t anticipate. I came in thinking it was going to be an intense busy week filled with learning astrophysics and the trip did not disappoint.
  • [The best thing about the trip was] Meeting everyone on the team in person and working on astrophysics at Caltech! I have been looking forward to this week ever since I was accepted in the program. I can honestly say I learned astrophysics at Caltech with an outstanding astronomy research scientist. Not very many people can say that! Our team really came together as one and that made the whole process very enjoyable in my opinion.

Summer Visit - 2019 - IDYL