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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

  • Qualities that are important to be an astronomer are perseverance and a willingness to learn from mistakes. Astronomers also have to be effective communicators in order to discuss their findings.
  • 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.
  • I was surprised by how much we got done in the short amount of time. When we went to JPL, seeing the scale models of the different spacecraft was SO COOL!!
  • [student:] The least surprising thing from this trip was the amount of information that we were given. I knew going in that there was going to be a lot of information to handle, but I was not anticipating the sheer amount that we were given, even on day one of working. There is a lot of hard-to-process data that goes into one very small, easily-understandable diagram.
  • [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.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - SCHARP