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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

  • 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).
  • [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.
  • 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.
  • 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 thought that the way the group handled increased independence during days three and four was both important and interesting. Important because it showed us that we didn’t need as much handholding as maybe some of us thought.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2019 - IDYL