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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

  • Picking the most interesting aspect of the NITARP experience is extremely difficult because there were so many. I knew that I was going to learn new and interesting things but I literally had no idea how many interesting aspects I would be exposed to.
  • 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.
  • [student:] This experience has changed my career plans by directing me in the direction of a research-based career. [...] This experience, especially the conference, has made extremely excited for college and has made me seriously consider graduate school.
  • After attending the AAS I feel I will really emphasize how failure in science can be a very valuable tool.
  • This experience reduced so much of the mystery about how astronomy research is done, and made it much more accessible. I know there are still so many ways that astronomy research happens that I don’t know, but this experience makes me feel like I’d be able to relate to those other methods, and envision being able to do the work.

Related Teams

AAS - 2020