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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

  • It was great to see the finished projects the NITARP teachers and students worked on. We made a few new friends and valuable connections with other scientists.
  • The students were also great to work with—not only mine, but those of the other teachers as well. They were a great bunch of kids to hang out with. It was really great getting to work alongside them instead of in the usual student-teacher sort of relationship—I’ll miss them, too.
  • [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[...]
  • [student:] All in all, NITARP really was an amazing experience. The coolest part to me was that I was doing REAL science--we didn't know what sort of answers we were going to get. The chance to do real, original research is irreplaceable. Coming in to NITARP, I had next to none astronomy background. NITARP opened my eyes up to the astronomy field, and I definitely want to take college courses now.
  • I will definitely be using the skills and the knowledge that I acquired in the NITARP program in the future for my own and for my future students’ research.

Related Teams

AAS - 2014