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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

  • [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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Astronomers must have a strong work ethic and be able to persevere through challenges. Astronomers must develop creative solutions to problems and be able to ask questions, including questions that arise as they work through data. They must be good at distinguishing patterns.
  • [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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - fIRes