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AAS - 2013

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.

We were out in force at the AAS 2013 meeting in Long Beach, CA! A record number of NITARP-affiliated people attended, including the 2012 class finishing up and the 2013 class getting going. The 80 or so NITARP-affiliated folks made up about 3% of the AAS attendees.

Special article on AAS attendees!  And don't miss Danielle Miller's blog!

Quotes

  • Adapting to not having the answer in the back of the book was something that I never registered upon beginning this, which wasn't expected.
  • By far the most interesting thing to me was the experience of presenting the poster. Not only did it make me feel like I was really part of the conference, it made me look back to the previous AAS when presenting a poster was not just very scary, it was almost inconceivable. So what a journey! Reflecting on how overwhelmed and terrified I was last year, how hard I worked to learn everything, and then to be there actually doing it with some confidence, well...priceless.
  • [At one of the sessions] one of the scientists had a terrible time talking. Painful as it was for him, he continued through it, and the students were surprised how tolerant the audience was, saying "that would never happen at our school." We had sort of a mini-lesson, or teachable moment on values and expectations, which was great! The students were also in awe of how difficult/mathematical/intense the material presented was.
  • The most interesting thing that I discovered was that there are so many different ways to become involved with astronomy. You can basically be any other type of scientist and become involved at some level with astronomy. This discovery changed for me the belief that astronomy, and even sciences in general, are fairly separate from each other. I had though the cross connections with astronomy happened but were not the norm; I see now that they are involved in nearly every major project.
  • This whole experience with NITARP has been amazing. I loved the chance to meet so many inspiring people. The astronomers we worked with were so excited about their work that I got excited, too.

Related Teams

AAS - 2013