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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

  • The most interesting thing I did was to discuss the learning experience with the students who participated in last year's [team]. [..] They were proud of themselves and seemed to be waiting for more.
  • [student:] I presented our [poster] to them, we talked about my goals and plans for attending their institution in the impending school year, and then they offered me a research opportunity [at my upcoming university] over the summer! Everything just came together so perfectly. It was easily one of the best days of my life.
  • In school when we do an experiment or lab in class, students are usually asked to predict a result. They write a conclusion based on the accuracy of their prediction. Although I understood before I was involved with NITARP that real science is not as clear-cut as classroom experiments, I was still surprised how complicated our results were, and how many additional questions it raised.
  • I did not anticipate how much the astronomers would trust us right away. I felt more like a colleague than a student, which was relieving (and maybe a bit stressful, because I probably would have found it easier to ask questions coming from a student role).
  • The most interesting part of the experience was seeing how the entire process of conducting research progressed, especially when our project was modified.

Related Teams

AAS - 2013