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Summer "Visit" - 2020 - OIRMA

Our regular summer visit to Caltech was hijacked by COVID-19. So we did an online work week instead -- 4 days when all the participants on the team come together to work intensively on the data. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

OIRMA worked July 5-9, 2020. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.


Quotes

  • [student:] I realized that good astronomers admit their lack of perfect knowledge and remain curious to strengthen their own intuition and identify new issues.
  • The best thing about the week was being able to contribute to a real project where we don’t know the answer. [...] It was refreshing to have the chance to explore and analyze.
  • Working together was super powerful because with many eyes on the same problem it takes less time to find new avenues and catch missteps.
  • Real astronomy is DATA. It is having to think outside the box to turn the invisible visible by using multiple sets of information from potentially multiple sources. I expected this would be part of the research project but was surprised by the ability to successfully change methods for data collection during the project.
  • Working with a highly expert mentor astronomer is crucial. (this is not a surprise, but just got reinforced!) On day 3 it turned out that we had WAY fewer AGN to work with than expected. I was scared that our science was in trouble. Varoujan came back morning of day 4 with an alternate approach to developing a catalog that opened things up again.

Summer "Visit" - 2020 - OIRMA