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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

  • I was surprised at the number of young people[...] I am used to seeing older people as astronomers.
  • I found myself continually challenged by the intellectual level and knowledge being shared.
  • 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.
  • The number one thing that the new people should know is that this experience is one of the best they will every have. You are meeting with people who share similar goals that is to learn and discover new things.
  • I assumed that [this project] would require a great deal of data analysis, what I didn't grasp until after this meeting was how focused and detailed the analysis would be. The steps in understanding that are gained through the analysis are much smaller than I anticipated they would be for the amount of work that is done.

Related Teams

AAS - 2012