• NASA
  • IPAC

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:] 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.
  • I think in order to be an astronomer you have to be smart, hard working, and really like data. You also need to know computer programming. And, based on what everyone on that Zoom call said, you need to be good at working on a team. There is more teamwork than I would have guessed.
  • [student:] Determination/resilience are qualities that I believe are very important to be an astronomer.
  • The major two qualities [for being an astronomer] are passion for learning and conquering the fear of not understanding content and learning to code.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - SNAG490