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AAS - 2015

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 2014 and 2015 NITARP teams attended the 2015 January AAS meeting in Seattle, WA. The 2014 class was presenting results and the 2015 class was starting up. We had many alumni raise money to come back as well. We sent about 50 people to the AAS and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

Quotes

  • This experience changed my thinking about astronomy a great deal. I am now seeing [astronomy] as a large umbrella that covers many specialties.
  • The first day I was confused and really started worrying about my ability to comprehend the science I was going to need to know. What helped was spending the next couple of days visiting with the students. I realized I was going to be involved in a lot of work but as long as I stuck with it I would eventually grasp the concepts that seemed out of reach. The students spent time explaining as long as I was willing to ask.
  • [student:] I now better understand that there are many, many professional astronomers over a variety of specific fields. (The scale of the AAS convention really demonstrated this.)
  • [student:] I’ve always planned to study some sort of science, though I’ve never been sure what kind. This experience has made me more comfortable with the idea of pursuing a field like astronomy, which I hope to major in and potentially even go into as a career. But I also became aware that there are many other fields, from engineering to computer science, that intersect with astronomy and it made me interested in pursuing those in the future as well.
  • [student:] I didn’t anticipate how friendly professional astronomers would be to high school students. They were really open and excited to share their work and genuinely interested in what we were doing. I definitely didn’t expect the range of projects that they covered and it piqued my interest in many topics and in pursuing astronomy as a profession.

Related Teams

AAS - 2015