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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

  • 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.
  • The NITARP experience inspires students to participate in research and inspires teachers to find a place in their work (either in a club, the classroom, or new programs) for authentic research. For me, personally, this year of working along with students to learn about black holes has shaped my pedagogical view that real research should be the basis for all science courses.
  • [student:] I didn’t expect for other astronomers to be so interested in our poster and the things we were doing. I feel like they were as surprised as we were that we could present such work.
  • [student:] This program has made me want to be the smartest I can be and never stop learning. I want to be be knowledgable about everything (an impossible task) and this experience has taught me to self educate and never stop looking for an answer and a new question.
  • [student:] I didn’t realize how much math and computation went behind the analysis.

Related Teams

AAS - 2016