Nora Hoch

I started working as part of this team the summer after first year of college as part of the Wellesley Science Summer Research program. I had no experience doing research and in fact hadn't taken any physics courses when I started. I applied and went to speak to Kim McLeod as an informal interview, and then got the position. This project exposed me to lots of different aspects of astronomy research, including instrumentation, data analysis, and observations. We helped to install the new telescope in the observatory and then I worked for three years doing observations for the TESS mission for NASA. What this looked like night-to-night was completing 4 - 8 hour observations of a potential planet and then conducting data analysis to to determine whether our observations supported its status as a candidate or we had "killed" the planet. While I did end up moving away from exoplanets and observational astronomy, I enjoyed the project and would recommend it to anyway interested in astronomy research.