• 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

  • [student:] The most rewarding thing about being part of NITARP is getting an authentic research experience that is not provided in a normal high school classroom setting. By participating in NITARP, I learned more about the actual research process from the beginning to the end and how to better collaborate with others.
  • I'm most surprised at how quickly we accomplished so many things.
  • 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 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.
  • There is nothing like the group being in the same room to ask questions and to support each other. Also, listening to others’ questions is an important piece of this project – many times, I didn’t think of the question that was posed before it was asked.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP