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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

  • [student:] The most rewarding thing about being part of NITARP was that I got to experience life in the shoes of a true astrophysicist.
  • I have an even greater appreciation of astronomy and astronomers because of this experience. To be able to make inferences and calculations from things basically intangible and find the possibilities in this research is really “out of this world”!
  • The least surprising thing [I learned] was the dedication and brilliance of those involved in astronomy research. I realize what a special group of people they really are to understand and persevere with their work.
  • It was epic learning how to actually go through the data and interpret what we were seeing. I also loved seeing the campus and working with the other teams.
  • 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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP