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Summer Visit - 2023 - AGNatha

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 AGNatha team came to visit in June 2023. The 5 core team educators attended, plus 10 students.

Quotes

  • Real astronomy is developing a question, getting data to help answer that question, adjusting the question based on the data, getting more data, and eventually summarizing your findings in a paper, poster, talk, etc. And acknowledging that there is still probably more to learn about your question. Everything we did felt like part of real astronomy; working as a team, starting with background stuff (what we know about this idea already), using the archive to sift through loads of data, digging really deep into one thing then zooming out to make sure we haven't lost sight of the original question, making mistakes (and luckily catching them before too much time had passed).
  • [Qualities of an astronomer are:] Patience, perseverance, passion, adaptability, flexibility
  • This has really illuminated for me the "nebulous"ness of research, as in we really didn't know what we would find in the data until we dug in, and what we found then began guiding and shaping the new questions we wanted to answer.
  • I was surprised how quickly the group sort of meshed together and got to work. Not to say all the students were best friends by the end of the week, but I was surprised how quickly they were willing to work together and share ideas and contribute to the project. I honestly expected it to be more of the teachers teaching the students and then hopefully when we left everyone would feel confident to continue the work. I think we all picked a great group of students who hit the ground running and understood they were there to work and everyone was as well versed as they could be on the project on day one.
  • One moment that was incredibly impactful for my students was when they heard from other scientists on the web conference and people were talking about “not belonging,” self doubt, and feeling “out of place” in their careers. That really resonated with my students and they told me how relieved they felt when other people said they felt that way too. They seemed much less anxious after hearing that and were more excited to push forward. Both of my students want to pursue Astronomy in some aspect in their higher education and I think hearing those comments from real scientists showed them that they don’t have to be perfect or the smartest person in the room to do Astronomy (or science in general). After that web conference, one of my students said “I’m going to remember this experience for the rest of my life.”

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2023 - AGNatha