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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

  • [student:] NITARP teaches collaboration skills, research skills, and general life skills that are valuable to a student whether or not they choose to pursue astronomy further.
  • [student:] Everyone always practiced the attitude of "It's okay to ask questions, be stupid, and be wrong," and this really kept everyone unified and energized.
  • I was very impressed by the students in this context, particularly during the summer meeting at Caltech. In many ways, they were more ready to handle the technical challenges that we faced.
  • [student:] I always knew I was interested in science, but I was always hesitant to say I’d like to pursue it as a career since I simply didn’t know enough about it.[...] the experience was unexpectedly fun and much more exciting and rewarding than I originally anticipated. At the AAS conference, meeting not only professional astronomers but engineers, scientific journalists, and other students made me realize how much astronomy covered and the different types of paths available. Overall, NITARP has made me realize that astronomy is something I definitely want to pursue in my future.
  • In both of my NITARP experiences, we have run into major difficulties that triggered a complete reworking of the project. At this point, I think I would expect things not to go as planned on a given science project. This is not a bad thing -- it is just the way things tend to go. We did reach a nice result in both cases, but there were some bumps along the way.

Related Teams

AAS - 2015