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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

  • 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.
  • My students saw a community of people who truly love what they do and are willing to explain it. They made many contacts and saw what science is all about – sharing discoveries and collaboration. Most importantly, they discovered that they can do this themselves, that they can belong to this community as well. Now they know they can become scientists and engineers themselves and not be afraid to follow their dreams and passions. Even if they don’t plan on being astronomers, at least now they know they can be successful in any science or engineering career. And for those that do plan on becoming astronomers (including one of my students), they made valuable contacts for internships, undergrad and graduate schools, scholarships, etc.
  • [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.
  • The big change in my view of astronomy and astronomers was the vast quantity of accessible archived data that is available. I had never thought about that prior to NITARP.
  • 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.

Related Teams

AAS - 2015