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AAS - 2016

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 2015 and 2016 NITARP teams attended the 2016 January AAS meeting in Kissimmee, FL. The 2015 class was presenting results and the 2016 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, and a special article on NITARP alumni at the AAS. All of the posters we presented are here:

Quotes

  • This experience really made me realize how broad a career field Astronomy really is. That is true of all the branches of science, but I just never really experiences it first hand until now. The students also commented on how surprising it was to converse with researches from other fields of astronomy and teach them the astronomy we were doing.
  • Astronomers are a more varied bunch than I’d thought, in a good way.
  • The big thing for me was that [the astronomers] were happy to talk to me! I guess I assumed there would be more social distance, and was happy to be largely wrong about that.
  • Scientific research is a team process which takes time, creativity and grit to develop. Current classrooms and education models do not reflect this or prepare students to have those skills.
  • [student: This program] teaches us teamwork and about the the specific astronomy subject at hand. It also gives us an excellent environment to practice and perfect the skills we learned through the process. It creates a great applied education for the people who are good with hands on learning.

Related Teams

AAS - 2016