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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:] NITARP didn’t necessarily change my career plans, but it definitely broadened them. I’ve pretty much always known I want to do something involving space. It’s just been what interests me for longer than I can remember. What NITARP, and specifically the AAS has shown me is there are way more options to think about than I thought. I still don’t know what I’ll be going into, but whatever it is, I’m sure I’ll end up being passionate about it.
  • [student:] I didn't anticipate was that people would really want to interact with our poster. It was really cool how people would ask questions, make suggestions, and talk about their own research and how it related to ours.
  • I did not anticipate the confidence that I would gain through the experience. There was so much information overload at the first AAS that I was a little overwhelmed. But, I didn’t realize how much I’d learned over the year until I went to the year 2 AAS.
  • I told my students that I had two big take-aways related to the classroom. The first was the realization that science is never really done. Even though we presented our work, there is still more extension work to be done. Also, I gained experience in learning from failure and authentic use of the scientific method. For example, most labs that we do in my class have pre-determined endings. However, in this experience, we there was not a predetermined ending. We got to make decisions along the way that led to authentic results.
  • [student:] I also know that because I was learning alongside my professor it showed me as a student that it is okay for me not to have all of the answers and I think working through a new problem with my [own future] students can help them to see that “failing” and making mistakes is okay and encouraged because there were times that we didn’t know what the next step we needed to take was but we eventually found the way and we learned more doing that.

Related Teams

AAS - 2020