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Summer Visit - 2022 - fIRes

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 fIRes team came to visit in July 2022. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 9 students.

Quotes

  • [The most surprising thing was] the sheer amount of data that astronomers have to work with. At times it seems as if it could be overwhelming
  • [student:] This experience definitely changed the way I think about astronomers. I wasn't aware of how complex and tedious the work they did was. Definitely opens my eyes to the complexity of figuring out information about distant objects.
  • [student:] The most surprising thing I saw and didn't know was the sheer amount of data these telescopes gather. There were billions of sources with multiple different types of information gathered on each source.
  • One of the best things was being able to take two students from our small, rural, school in Appalachia and watch them fearlessly ask questions, struggle, work hard, and thrive in the environment at Caltech. They also successfully navigated the challenges of traveling and temporarily living in a new place One of my two students had never flown before, which is likely not a rare condition for a NITARP student, but no one in his immediate family had ever flown before.
  • This experience continued to remind me of why I love astronomy. The opportunity to work at this level with a mentor astrophysicist and share it with my students is just incredible. There is no other opportunity like it.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - fIRes