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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 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
  • My advice for teachers is to allow students space to formulate their own ideas. Students need the opportunity to struggle and make mistakes alongside their teacher. It’s okay not to be the expert - it’s meaningful to model struggling right along with your students.
  • [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:] Before this experience I was aware that astronomers did work to progress in the science world, but I didn't realize just how much research, scientifically common knowledge, and effort was required for astronomers to do their jobs.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2022 - fIRes