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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:] Going into the convention center, I was a bit overwhelmed and intimidated by all the astronomers and astrophysicists that were there. To my surprise, I found that everyone was very inviting and inquisitive about his or her research, and mine.
  • [student:] This experience made me realize that astronomy is a lot more complicated than what we think. I am so happy I got to have this experience at such a young age because not that many people have gotten a chance to do anything like this in their lives.
  • This is going to change my classroom by incorporating an astronomy club in which we will be continuing the research that I started, generating an outreach program and educating the community about astronomy.
  • [student:] Overall, I learned that astronomy is much more of an organized community than I otherwise imagined.
  • [student:] The most important thing I learned at the AAS was how close knit and accepting the astronomical society truly is. I think often the sciences are made out to be highly exclusive, in that you must be a genius in order to make any meaningful discoveries, and that there is a lot of deeply entrenched competition between scientists. But, experiencing the AAS conference has shown me that not only do people from around the country collaborate with one another to perform research, they also have a wonderful alacrity to explain their findings to everyone[...]

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AAS - 2014