• NASA
  • IPAC

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 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.
  • This experience made me think about the massive amount of astronomical data generated and archived. There must be all kinds of new discoveries waiting to be found in those data!
  • 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.
  • [student:] I loved astronomy prior to the trip but I have even more interest in it now that I’ve gotten to do some actual work in the area.
  • 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