Chelen Johnson
These teams worked on their own and presented posters at the 2020 Winter AAS.
My takeaway lesson is that the students are much more tolerant of "issues" that make the research projects difficult to carry out and are generally content to be involved and learning something new.
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 just think experiencing a conference of this size and magnitude is terrific.