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Summer Visit - 2025 - HIPS-AGaiN

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 HIPS-AGaiN team came to visit in July 2025. The 4 core team educators attended, plus 6 students.

Quotes

  • [The most surprising thing was] To see just how quickly the teachers and students involved in the project blossom in terms of their knowledge, skill and (most importantly to me) their confidence regarding both the science and the research process. It is a true joy to see all of the hard work put in over the prior months come to fruition. The group left the experience seeing themselves as researchers. That is an amazing and powerful transformation!
  • [student:] I love science in general, but this program has rekindled the part of my personality that always loves to learn and is curious about everything.
  • [student:] Sometimes it seems like in astronomy ‘oh, they've discovered all they need to discover,’ but it’s not even close. So NITARP has been encouraging in that I can pick a topic that might seem super specific, but I can still find a team of people that are willing to research that with me. That's awesome.
  • We also passed Kip Thorne on the sidewalk—I didn’t really know who he was, but it was neat to feel validated in our right to take up space at Caltech because we are contributing to real research.
  • I was blown away by the scale of everything. The data sets are huge, the scale of NASA’s mission, - everything was bigger and better that I expected and I expected a lot.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - HIPS-AGaiN