• NASA
  • IPAC

AAS - 2020

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 2019 and 2020 NITARP teams attended the 2020 January AAS meeting in Honolulu, HI. The 2019 class was presenting results and the 2020 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:

2019 Teams:

NITARP Management:

Returning Alumni Teams:

Quotes

  • [student:] I don't know for sure what I want to do as a career yet but I am hoping to major in physics or astronomy in college. When I went into the NITARP program I didn't know what I wanted to study but I really enjoyed this experience and I find our research very interesting and I am hoping to learn more about physics and astronomy in the future.
  • It was great to experience working with students more as colleagues than students.
  • [The] intrinsic motivation that comes about when a student learns that struggling with a problem yields a result (btw, the NITARP idea that research sometimes leads nowhere (forgive the oversimplification) is an important lesson, but at the same time, students ARE successful with every step of the process. [...] how much of the Algebra 2 curriculum is embedded in astronomy, and how abstractly weird ideas like logs fall out as the most natural way to talk about things. [...] NITARP exposes kids to the reality of STEM employment… things like the normalcy of your families, the kinds of things STEM can do in a professional setting. Few kids have real world scientists as role models and hence have no basis for visualizing a future as a scientist. NITARP kids do.
  • [student:] This experience has changed my career plans by directing me in the direction of a research-based career. [...] This experience, especially the conference, has made extremely excited for college and has made me seriously consider graduate school.
  • [student:] I’ve always been interested in space, but I wasn’t ever sure of what I really wanted to do. When I was probably ten, I used to say I wanted to be an astronomer. As I grew older that idea sort of faded because I ended up connecting it things like ancient Greeks, and a science whose importance has faded. NITARP really showed me that there are a lot more avenues to astronomy that I had thought.

Related Teams

AAS - 2020