AAS - 2021

Quotes

• [student:] Now I feel more comfortable in both communication and comprehension of topics in astronomy as compared to the mindset I held before taking part in the program.
• Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, my unconscious misconceptions of science continue to burble forth. I finally came to understand that “research” is a much broader term than I thought. [...]the struggle continues, and continues to delight.
• [student:] Experiences like NITARP teach participants to take responsibility for their own learning. For example., If I wanted to get good at the software we used for this project, the onus was on me to practice and learn it. There was no grade nor enforcer making me. I think this accountability to one’s self is valuable, and absent from current education systems. Experience like NITARP teach participants how to teach themselves and learn on their own whereas traditional school often just drags students along to where they have to be without regard to the underlying quality of the students learning.
• [student:] Having the experience of working with other intelligent, hardworking, curious people makes me want to do more of it in the future.
• The most interesting thing I did over the whole year was seeing the entire process of how [we] thought of [the] research question, then how we would gather the data to explore it (using IRSA) and then learning the software (Topcat) that made sense of the data. The reality of the experience matched my expectations. It was a bumpy process, with points where we needed to pivot.

Related Teams

• OIRMA/Gorjian
• Spider/Rebull