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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

  • 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.
  • [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.
  • [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.
  • There is no substitute for in-person experience. We bonded and grew as a team. We were where the action happens and it kind of made everything real.
  • I got to understand what it means to conduct astronomy research. It’s much more collaborative than I would have ever imagined.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - HIPS-AGaiN