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Summer Visit - 2012 - HR4AGN

The summer visit to Caltech is 3-4 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 HR4AGN team came to visit in August 2012. The core team educators attended, plus 12 students, and one additional scientist.  The scientist mentor is Dr. Varoujan Gorjian. IPAC staff member Jacob Llamas (SSC) assisted, as did Dr. Jean-Christophe Mauduit (SSC).

Quotes

  • The best thing about the trip was having some of the incredible knowledge of all of these amazing astronomers rub off on me.
  • [student:] The best thing about my experience at IPAC was getting to meet people from all around the country and seeing what it is like to work on a real research project in astronomy as I believe that is a career path I would like to pursue.
  • The most surprising thing I learned was how astronomy works. I had assumed that it was all about doing large amount of complex mathematics and other number crunching. This trip gave me the impression that a far more wide array of skills and people are required.
  • [It was not surprising to me that] the process of research and collaboration is not so easy; we are working through null results and that there can be times where it doesn't seem if there's any progress made, but we keep on trucking through the data anyway.
  • The most important thing was that I really got a feel for how astronomical research is done. I found the discussions really interesting as well; every time someone found a trend or a possible trend in the data, there would be a discussion as to what they had found and whether or not it meant anything.

Related Teams

Summer Visit - 2012 - HR4AGN