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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

  • I am amazed that we all have an understanding of the entire process and its components. A lot of little pieces need to come together to make the proposal, project, and presentation make sense. The depth of individual knowledge of our participants surprised me. I was not surprised by my group members’ work ethic and cooperation.
  • Working together in the same location IRL is crucial for a bunch of reasons: personal dynamics develop more rapidly. It is easier to tell if people are on the same page. You can change the mode more rapidly and flexibly (change from big group to small and back, work on paper, change to whiteboard, share multiple screens at same 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.
  • I cannot think of anything that would have improved this experience.
  • [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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - IDYL