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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:] Not only do we learn educational topics with the science content but we also learn those 21st century skills of working with other people, and through this experience it is so much more than just working with peers it is working with people of all ages and from all over. It is learning how to navigate difficult new concepts and work in a professional way with people you have never met face to face. This experience gave us a glimpse into the world of NASA that people from my area don’t get the chance to see.
  • [As a result of this experience,] In my engineering course, I’ve revised the labs to generate more data, and am building more Excel work into the projects. In Algebra, I’m finding more opportunities to use Excel, and in Geometry I’m incorporating astronomical concepts and experiences.
  • [student:] through this past year I was able to see the impact of having people in professions that are “like” you. For me, this is the idea that there are women astronomers that aren’t necessarily the stereotypical science type, but women who are smart and powerful but also are in touch with their feminine side and still dress up and do “girly” things. I remember when our team first found out that we were working with a female astronomer we all freaked out and got so excited for the chance to work with that specific astronomer.
  • [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:] I think [this experience] changed my whole perspective on scientific research in general. People often tell you about how science is a lot of trial and error, but you never really experience that in a class setting where all your labs are pre-planned. This experience really shed a new light on that process and made the idea of doing new research less daunting.

Related Teams

AAS - 2020