• NASA
  • IPAC

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

  • [Advice to future participants:] Be prepared to work hard but also have fun doing so. Soak it all in and enjoy the experience. I was surprised with how much my students enjoyed doing the “work” part of the trip. I was careful in my selection process but ultimately these are teenagers and you just never truly know how they will handle the workload. I would overhear them say how great it was to be actually doing the real work. As their teacher, it was very rewarding to give them this opportunity.
  • I didn’t realize how important writing was to astronomy. It made me really happy, because I was a writer before I entered the astronomy field. It made me feel like my path suddenly made sense.
  • I think astronomy is more about constructing a story and how to tell that story through data and research than I thought. I enjoy how we have to come up with creative, innovative, and clever ways to shed light on the objects we are studying. It’s a total foray into the unknown and we are finding new ways to apply the tools that we have at our disposal as we go.
  • It was great seeing how astronomers work. I enjoyed hearing from the other professionals at the lunch. I didn’t realize there were so many different opportunities in the field.
  • The most important/interesting thing was working on the project. I got to really test myself and see if I could do authentic research. I got the chance to see how science really works.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - HIPS-AGaiN