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Summer Visit - 2022 - SNAG490

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 SNAG490 team came to visit in June-July 2022. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 5 students.

Quotes

  • [student:] The best thing about this trip was getting the opportunity to experience what actual astronomy is, and participate in real science. I love that I get to continue this research and find things that no one has before.
  • [student:] Determination/resilience are qualities that I believe are very important to be an astronomer.
  • [student:] Overall it was interactive and more collaborative than what I think of when someone said scientific research.
  • Well, it seems like “real astronomy” is analyzing data. Making the satellites and rovers is really more engineering, which I guess I did not realize. I guess I expected to analyze data, but I had no idea how we would do that. So learning all about how to read SEDs and CCDs/CMDs etc. is something I did not realize I would be doing, but it is because before this I did not know SEDs existed.
  • [student:] I was told it's okay to fail, as most or all of learning is failing and accepting help from others, which I used to not believe entirely but this experience was definitely impactful.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - SNAG490