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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

  • 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:] The most rewarding thing about being part of NITARP was that I got to experience life in the shoes of a true astrophysicist.
  • [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.”
  • [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.
  • My advice for teachers is to be willing to take the risk of learning side-by-side with your students. Likely every teacher is reluctant to do this, but if you can get over the initial anxiety, the rewards are great for yourself, your students, and even your school’s culture.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP