AAS - 2020

Quotes

• [student: The most interesting thing I learned was] The amount of work that astronomers put into research in relation to the small amount of time that they present it.
• 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.
• I am going to add more data analysis to my astronomy classes and math classes. It has increased my expectations of what students are capable of as well.
• [student:] I think that NITARP showed me that working with others is better than working alone, so I’ll think I’ll try my best to work with other others for my assignments. I say this because I usually try to work alone, but I learned so much from my NITARP team members this experience, and so maybe I’ll learn something from someone else at school.
• We did not anticipate getting all of the way through our selection process and then find that a crucial step used invalid data! But it was very satisfying to step back, and figure out a process that would give us useful results in the end. It was a great way to experience for ourselves the fact that it is normal to encounter obstacles in research.

Related Teams

• Dust Mights/Gorjian
• IDYL/Rebull
• Independent Research 2019
• NITARP management, 2016-date
• OIRMA/Gorjian
• Spider/Rebull