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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

  • I also thought the science was extremely cut-throat and reclusive, when the exact opposite is true. People have to work together to accomplish large tasks, share new findings, and support future research. I was amazed at the diversity of personnel [...] and comradery in the field.
  • You cannot learn the process of science research passively. Being immersed into your own astronomical research with the NITARP program is the only way to learn how real scientific research is done.
  • [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.
  • What I’m excited about is building my skillset and credibility as an authentic astronomer in research.
  • [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.

Related Teams

AAS - 2020