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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:] When we went to dinner last night, for about an hour, we couldn't stop talking about everything that we learned the day before, to the point where we had to say, ‘no more star talk.’ But we quickly violated that rule.
  • My favorite thing was diving deeper into our research topic, which led me to think deeply about the fate of our universe. I also felt like I got to learn more about how galaxies evolve and form as well as the significance of black holes as “seeds.” Conversations like these were equal parts fun and empowering!
  • 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 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.
  • Communication is more a part of “real astronomy” than I first thought. For instance, being able to balance the clarity of our approach with the ambiguity of the objects we are studying seems incredibly important to the research process. Being able to explain here is why we are doing this and why this method should work based on what we know and what we don’t know about AGNs.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2025 - HIPS-AGaiN