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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

  • 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.
  • The importance of building a team relationship is the key to success. The benefits of working together at Caltech include being able to immediately receive feedback from the mentor astrophysicist and the other participants as well as being able to ask questions that occur organically in the midst of a conversation.
  • [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.
  • [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.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - fIRes