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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

  • 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 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.
  • I really thought astronomers knew everything about the night sky and never realized there were several specializations within the content.
  • 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 was worried that they would be boring old man scientists when in reality they were people from all different back grounds talking passionately about what they love.

Related Teams

AAS - 2015