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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

  • [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.
  • The anxious moments are when I'm at the point of understanding where there is 50% clarity and 50% confusion. This is the teachable moment and the summer experience put us right at that sweet spot over and over again. It is amazing how proud it makes you feel to move through this point and to persist until clarity wins. Thank you, always, for helping us to celebrate all these tiny victories, and for pushing us right into the next moment of 50/50 understanding!
  • [student:] NITARP is really different from our classes where we're trying to cover so much material in a short amount of time, so you can't go in depth, right? With NITARP, we're spending several days doing a deep, deep dive into really specific information.
  • 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.
  • [student:] Before this experience, I did not know much about astronomers, and I had a very basic understanding of astronomy. This experience showed me that there are so many incredibly detailed and niche areas to study and research in the universe, and information gathered by one group can be used for entirely different purposes. I also learned that astronomy includes a lot of unknowns, guesswork, assumptions, and more questions than answers.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - HIPS-AGaiN