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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

  • [At the AAS,] Teachers and students experience real, dynamic science as it lives today, where there may be no answers, explanations that change with new data, and most importantly there is discourse between scientists so that they may learn from each other.
  • I believe this experience will make me a better ambassador of my college and my fields (sciences and education). I have a renewed interest in working within all science disciplines, unafraid to meet the interests or questions of my students. The NITARP experience was the perfect opportunity at the perfect time. I hope to get involved with more research groups, beyond my campus.
  • [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.
  • I believe that no one can walk away from the NITARP experience unchanged. Everyone talks about the learning curve, and it is definitely steeper for some of us than others. I believe the “powers that be” need to know how this year-long astronomy boot camp not only builds discipline knowledge but also group learning dynamics. I have never been so proud to say that I have been part of an exceptional group, and in turn organization. I not only learned what it means to be a teacher leader, but assist in making teacher leaders.
  • [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.

Related Teams

AAS - 2020