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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 is] going to change my outlook on the presentations I might give to a class. I now understand that presenting research is just as important as the research itself.
  • Coming to the conference was very beneficial because it is re-inspiring to get out of the classroom and back with the scientific community. It makes the job of teaching seem even more important and makes me want to go back and enthusiastically involve my students (who are all girls) in research and unique learning opportunities.
  • I was surprised that I was capable of understanding most topics I encountered. I attribute this to people's willingness to start from the beginning and to explain things at a beginning level. The result was I eventually felt perfectly comfortable asking absolutely anyone to explain his or her research. That took several such conversations, but the experience has been very empowering.
  • [student:] I found at the conference that I was more interested in how the telescopes were built than the actual data-taking, which confirmed my interest in engineering. Therefore, although I do not plan on becoming an astronomer, this project definitely enhanced my desire to pursue the sciences/engineering/research in college.
  • [student:] I learned about new resources that I didn’t even know existed. Almost like finding a new continent, vast and ready to be explored. The scientist helped us get familiar with what the buttons did and how to understand what the buttons did, but we were the ones who decided which buttons to press, and we ended up being excellent and ambitious button-pressers.

Related Teams

AAS - 2015