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AAS - 2012

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is the largest meeting of professional astronomers in the world. NITARP educators attend an AAS first to meet their team, then they go home and work remotely for much of the year, and then attend an AAS to present their results.  At any given AAS, then, we could have two NITARP classes attending - those finishing up, and those getting started. Reload to see a different set of quotes.

The 2011 and 2012 NITARP teams attended the 2012 January AAS meeting in Austin, TX. The 2011 class was presenting results and the 2012 class was starting up. We sent about 60 people to the AAS (the largest delegation to date) and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. We also got a smattering of coverage in local media outlets.

Quotes

  • [student:] The most interesting thing I learned is that astronomy is such a huge field. There are so many things that you can research. [..]whatever you find in your research, astronomers want to know about it.
  • This experience convinced me even further that I can push myself to learn even more each and every day. I started out feeling very overwhelmed and unprepared last year. I forced myself to work through my unease and wound up much more comfortable. I learned that astronomers are much more down-to-earth than I envisioned a lot of them to be and so many of them are very willing to go out of their way to explain things when we have questions.
  • I had an amazing, exhausting time at the AAS meeting.
  • After two days of being totally overwhelmed by all the high level science going on around me, it was a relief and simply awesome to see that these professional astronomers were also somewhat clueless about my own research. This was such an amazing capstone to the NITARP experience, actually feeling I was on nearly the same level as everyone else presenting.
  • [Even as a student,] I was surprised how many people I now know after 2 AAS [meetings].

Related Teams

AAS - 2012