AstroLands Summer Interns 2021 Blog 8

Hi everyone, Lauren and Gráinne here again!

Sadly, we’re coming to the end of our time at I-LOFAR – only one more week to go! We had a great week finishing up all the Astro Camps. It was very busy but a lot of fun meeting so many students interested in science at one time! 

The AstroLands Academy ran on Monday and Tuesday and was a change from our previous camps for younger students. We did a lot less cutting and sticking and a lot more discussing of careers and ethics in space! We were delighted to get the chance to share our own experiences with the students and give advice on everything from financing college life to the choices available within our courses. We had a different set of speakers for AstroLands Academy also, and we both enjoyed getting to hear from PhD students and scientists a bit further into their careers than us. We learned a lot ourselves too!

On Wednesday we jumped right back into the more junior camps to run Nebula 2 – our second Astro Camp for 10-12 year olds. The energy levels were certainly higher and they kept us on our toes with plenty of questions and comments! We got stuck into designing aliens and moon landers again, and got to tour ESA and the Swedish Solar Telescope virtually for the very last time. We heard every ‘what if’ question in the book from our Campers so thank you guys for keeping it interesting! 

We’d like to thank all the speakers that joined us over the past few weeks for each Astro Camp and also the groups that made the camps and our astro focused summer possible! Thank you to StreamBIRR, ESERO Ireland, PRE-EST, Trinity College Dublin, and Science Foundation Ireland for making it all happen 🙂 

We’ll be back next week for our final blog to wrap up our summer internships. Thanks for having us!