Summer "Visit" - 2020 - OIRMA

Quotes

• [student:] what I will never forget is my temporary lack of comprehension and occasional struggles to keep up with the rest of the group. In those situations, I was forced to accept my own shortcomings and ask others to clarify or slow down. This last week has taught me to rely on others and be honest with my own skills.
• [student:] The best thing about the week was that I as a student was able to help out and contribute ideas to the project. I was not just being told what to do, but I had the opportunity to actually help solve problems and find solutions.
• It was very interesting that we had to immediately pivot our plans. It doesn’t get more authentic than when Plan A didn’t work, and as a team we had to talk out our next steps on how to find applicable data. It has also been very interesting to see how that develops as we all branch into our own pieces of the research, and how that dialogue continues.
• [student:] Real astronomy is not the enhanced pictures that ordinary people are used to seeing in the news or on the internet, instead it is data. It’s knowing how to manipulate this data to understand what it truly means. It is extracting from these numbers the structure of something that we can barely even see. In essence, astronomy is the ingenuity to turn something that is invisible into something visible. Something that I expected to be a part of scientific research was accessing the data and creating the light curves. Something that I did not expect to be a part of authentic research was the flexibility that was needed to obtain the data that you need.
• [...]one of NITARP’s superpowers: the way that research work can reshape the relationship between students and teachers from a hierarchical one to something more collaborative.

Related Teams

• OIRMA/Gorjian