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Summer Visit - 2012 - C-WAYS

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 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 C-WAYS team came to visit in July 2012. The core team educators attended, plus 12 students, and two additional scientists.  Dr. JD Armstrong (LCOGT/UH) and Dr. Babar Ali (IPAC) also assissted.

Quotes

  • [student:] I had no idea that astronomy involved so much math! When I was first presented with a super long list of unit conversions and formulas, I almost gave up on a career in astronomy. I felt really overwhelmed because math has never been my strong suit. After successfully completing a few SEDs and color-color plots, I felt accomplished and realized that I wasn't as bad at math as I previously thought. Maybe I do have a chance at being an astronomer after all.
  • [student:] I had a newfound view of the work that astronomers must do to gather the answers they seek.
  • Probably the most interesting thing I learned was that astronomers are more detectives piecing the universe together. Since we cannot actually see the life cycle of a star, we are forced to look at stars in different points in their (unfathomably long) lives and match them up in sequential order. Most importantly, "real science" is nothing like "textbook science" where we have explicit directions and there is a definite right or wrong answer. In the real world of science, we have to trust ourselves that we have done our best to reach the answer we deem correct.
  • [This] is such an amazing opportunity that not many can say they've had, and I'm honored to be a part of it.
  • [Astronomy] proved to be far more interesting than I thought previously possible.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - C-WAYS