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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

  • NITARP has greatly changed the way I view my astronomy course. Since I have participated in NITARP, my astronomy course has become much more focused on the “how do we know what we know about stars” and my students spend quite a bit of time in class analyzing spectra, doing photometry and estimating distances through the use of real data. While the “real” research opportunity through NITARP is left as an after school club activity, all of my students have benefited from my involvement in NITARP.
  • [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.
  • [student:] This program made me realize that I genuinely love scientific research.
  • [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:] I’ve always planned to study some sort of science, though I’ve never been sure what kind. This experience has made me more comfortable with the idea of pursuing a field like astronomy, which I hope to major in and potentially even go into as a career. But I also became aware that there are many other fields, from engineering to computer science, that intersect with astronomy and it made me interested in pursuing those in the future as well.

Related Teams

AAS - 2015