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Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP

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 SCHARP team came to visit in June 2023. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

Quotes

  • Qualities that are important to be an astronomer are perseverance and a willingness to learn from mistakes. Astronomers also have to be effective communicators in order to discuss their findings.
  • I think [this experience] helped me realize and experience how much work [astronomers] do and how many different tools get used. I liked experiencing the "huh, that's weird" moment when we found something neat.
  • [student:] I was most surprised by how quickly much of the data we were given was processed in such a short amount of time, even when doing work "by hand." The SEDs, for instance, were expected to take a long time to complete, but even when doing them in Excel, my team was able to complete them very quickly.
  • Real astronomy is making sense of data, asking questions, and trying to develop an approach answering those questions. Everything we did on this visit was scientific research. We asked questions, looked at data, asked more questions, compared existing information to visual data, and made plenty of mistakes and had to start over.
  • [student:] I always thought astronomy was looking through telescopes, collecting data, and mapping stars. I never expected it to be creating graphs and doing math for them. I always knew you had to be really bright but I always thought you generally knew what you were looking at. I never thought you would be discovering worlds and stars that have never been looked at before and have to learn along the way.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP