Longmei Ge reports on the Materials in Science and Engineering course at Stanford University, where she studied exoplanet and star-system research this summer. “Two recently graduated students visited one of our classes to speak to us about binary-star systems, which I thought were absolutely fascinating,” Longmei says.
“During the week we also reduced more exoplanet transit data. However, this week we reduced new transits—raw data that hadn’t been touched yet. All of our results were previously unreduced, which I thought was super exciting,” Longmei exclaims!
The data students worked on will be used in a paper for Stanford Online HS to be written by instructor Kalée Tock and other students this fall. Students that help with the data will get their names added to the paper and Longmei plans to participate.
For a weekend assignment, students were instructed to watch one of several movies related to space, astronomy, or extraterrestrial life. Longmei’s choices, Arrival and The Martian, were then discussed with other movies on the last day of class.
“My global competencies workshops were also awesome. On Monday, we had a pre-recorded video to watch. Our assignment that day was to create a one-minute video of our lives made of short clips of ourselves over the past year. It was so cool to see the similarities and differences I had with my peers. On Wednesday, we had a live Zoom session where we discussed different levels of cultural understanding and assimilation as well as different types of activism,” Longmei explains.
“’Image of the day’ might be one of my top 3 favorite parts of my course. Essentially we’re given a prompt the night before to bring an image and short description to class (we use the screen share on Zoom). At the beginning of each meeting, we each talk about our picture. The pictures my peers presented were all so interesting. Space truly is an incredible place,” Longmei says.
>> Read Longmei’s Final Report. (PDF file, 94 KB).
>> Learn about other students’ experiences in the GFF Scholarship Program.
