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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:] I’ve seen people coming from different schools and realized that many times the school they come from doesn’t really matter. It’s the passion that comes from inside that really makes a person successful.
  • I realized I hate being in the student role and having that clueless feeling. But I definitely will take this back to the classroom and have more empathy for kids who tend not to ask questions.
  • [student:] I plan to now major in astronomy before going to law school, so that I can do science based law. Someone at the conference suggested this to me when I mentioned that I really love law, and they told me that since space travel is an upcoming field that I should look into that.
  • [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:] Our teacher gave us the basic rules, and just let us go. In the beginning, we had no idea where to start. We were supposed to pick a topic of research and I remember being so used to teachers telling me every single thing I had to accomplish and every thing I wasn’t supposed to do or try. This project taught me that you will never get a checklist in a scientific career. There are no answers yet, and it’s up to you to figure them out. This is why I have trouble with the way students are taught in school. It’s easy to get an A when you have everything you’re supposed to do as a checklist, but there is no learning in that. You can’t fail at something that’s already done for you.

Related Teams

AAS - 2015