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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

  • 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.
  • We were also lucky to have two astronomers who were very knowledgeable who disagreed on many aspects of our work. Students can't get this kind of authentic learning experience in a typical classroom setting. Listening to both sides of the discussion and then being able to explain our work based on those thoughts was a thought-provoking experience for our students.
  • [student:] This experience has shown me many of the applicable qualities that subjects such as calculus and physics hold.
  • 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.
  • I was again reminded of how eye-opening a conference like this can be to a high school student with limited experience outside their home area. For them, the sessions presented were a view into a world they really didn’t know even existed. They were quick to recognize and admit that they largely knew nothing about what was presented in the sessions – but they were just as quick to talk about the fact that they were interested, curious, and wanted to figure out more. The poster sessions also provide opportunity for them to see themselves as potentially having a place among those attending and presenting. They were able to find people that they could talk to about the things the heard about in the talks and learn more. When they presented their own work it was amazing to see how much their confidence and abilities grew.

Related Teams

AAS - 2014