• 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:] 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 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.
  • [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.
  • 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.
  • I knew that there would be a lot of work to do going in to this week so I guess that is what was least surprising for me. I have been looking forward to this for a long time and I absolutely loved learning the specific math and physics behind what we are doing in our project. It makes me want to take more classes in astrophysics!

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - IDYL