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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

  • The major thing [I learned] is that astronomers or any scientist all have moments of feeling "stupid" and you should push through it. Also you do not need to have astronomy backgrounds to work in the career field if you are a coder for example.
  • [student:] I feel stupid a lot of the time when doing this work and it felt reassuring to hear Luisa say that it's okay.
  • 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:] The most surprising thing I did was enjoy myself. I didn't expect to feel happy while working (that sounds bad), but I expected to just be really stressed. It was stressful, but also extremely rewarding. On the last day I still felt like I had energy left for a couple more in-person all-day work days.
  • Astronomy is not really what I thought it would be. It is much more computer programming and data analysis than I realized. It is still interesting, just not what I expected at all. Which is good, actually, because I am really learning a lot.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - SNAG490