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AAS - 2014

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 2013 and 2014 NITARP teams attended the 2014 January AAS meeting in National Harbor, MD (outside of Washington, DC). The 2013 class was presenting results and the 2014 class was starting up. We had a lot of alumni raise their own money to come back as well. We sent about 75 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. One of our participants, Peggy Piper, participated in a Congressional briefing on Thursday! All the posters we presented are linked from the team's pages below, except for HG-WELS and SIRXS, because they are the two new teams.

Quotes

  • [student:] This project – all of it – has also changed the way that I see the classroom and what it can be. It has changed the way I see classwork and work that I see as ‘hard’. I also see that I have a more open mind now and bigger view of the world and what I can do.
  • [student: This experience] has also given me a lot more experience of working with people I don’t know and increased my presentation skills.
  • It was very satisfying to be able to converse with the grad students about their science and actually understand what they were talking about. I felt proud when several of them remarked that they were surprised to learn that the research was undertaken by teachers and their high school students. They were surprised I was a teacher and that my students were “only in high school.” I guess we challenged several of their preconceptions about what teachers can accomplish.
  • [student:] This experience changed my views not just about astronomy, but science in general because it showed me just how much little things interact with each other and form a big picture understanding. This will change the way I look at almost all my subjects, as now I will start thinking from the get-go where everything fits in the goal I am trying to achieve, whether it be economics or physics.
  • A few different people asked if we were going to publish our results which I thought was a pretty big compliment -- and I mentioned it to our scientist.

Related Teams

AAS - 2014