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AAS - 2019

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 2018 and 2019 NITARP teams attended the 2019 January AAS meeting in Seattle, WA. The 2018 class was presenting results and the 2019 class was starting up. We had 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:

2018 Teams:

NITARP Management:

Returning Alumni Teams:

 


Quotes

  • I thought I knew astronomy and quickly became aware that my depth of knowledge was a mere puddle compared to the Marianna trench.
  • Before NITARP, I didn’t really know how much I enjoyed doing research. I had done it before (in grad school and afterwards with RBSE), but it really hit home how enjoyable it was for me once I got involved with the NITARP program. I really like doing it and I plan on continuing with it.
  • [student:] I think one of the most interesting things I did was having conversations with college students and their posters. The reality of the experience was more than I could have imagined, having the opportunity to have one to one conversations with people making substantial research in the field was more than what I expected.
  • Astronomers are a lot nicer than I thought they would be, and they’re much more willing to chat about their research than I expected.
  • [student:] There is no way that I could have even imagined doing a project like this without the guidance that I had. Now, after the fact I believe that with some fluency in python that I could do our project in a mere fraction of the time that we spent collaboratively. The fact that others had to depend on me getting my work done was a big motivation. Another was my passion for learning, especially when I had the opportunity to apply it. I could not have learned or applied anything of this project without guidance, I would simply be wandering blindly.

AAS - 2019