Chelen Johnson
Overall, I think one of my favorite parts of the trip was watching all of the students from around the country bond into a very productive team. They would help each other through the work we were doing to make sure everyone understood and was at the same place.
[The best thing about the trip was} Doing real science. I can't say enough how much I value the opportunity NITARP has given me to be part of real astronomy research for the first time in my career. Bringing back the knowledge, the feeling of not knowing, the drive to continue to find an answer and the skills that I needed to work in a group will be so helpful to me and my students.
I assumed that [research] would require a great deal of data analysis, what I didn’t grasp until after this[, my first AAS] 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.
