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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 challenging aspect was navigating the various websites that we used to construct our data. It was frustrating sometimes because we were all learning and trying to figure out which button to press, whether this graph was correct or not, or which steps I am missing.
  • [qualities important for an astronomer are] Resilience and being comfortable in not knowing. That has got to be so frustrating. And strangely rewarding at the same time.
  • The least surprising thing about the summer meeting at Caltech was the rich, immersive environment that allowed the teachers and students to learn a large amount of content in a short period of time and apply it immediately.
  • [student:] The most important thing I learned was that it is okay to ask for help and ask questions I may have thought were rather “dumb.”
  • 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”!

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP