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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
  • the fact that someone, somewhere (namely, you who write the grants and those that fund them) valued what we do and thought we were worthy of some extra investment, made me feel more effective and more confident and made me think forward to additional opportunities and accomplishments, rather than being saddled with the day-to-day deadlines and targets that typically dominate a teacher's thinking.
  • [student:] An astronomer requires a large work ethic. The thing about space is that not all questions have an answer. You have to work towards a finish line that you can't see and that may not even be there. Perseverance is a huge part of it too!
  • [student:] Some qualities that I think are important to be an astronomer are having a good work ethic, being patient, having good communication skills, being open-minded for learning new things, and being able to focus on what you need to do for long periods of time without getting distracted.
  • [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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - fIRes