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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

  • I realized going into this that astronomy probably did not mean working with full-color Hubble images all day, every day. What I didn't realize, however, is the amount and type of data involved. There's a lot! And looking through all of it can be a bit tedious. Fortunately, computers make our work soooo much easier.
  • [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:] 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.
  • [student:] Also, make sure to work hard. Not only for your own good, but for the people who are working with you. You are a team and no team can be run by a single person.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - fIRes