AAS - 2022

Quotes

• [student:] I always used to think astronomy and research, in general, was a very cutthroat, individual field where it’s every scientist for themselves. But through NITARP, it’s become clear to me that astronomy is nothing like this at all. The whole goal of this field is to work together to create a greater understanding of our universe. Everyone is collaborative, encouraging, and happy to help you learn.
• I am pursuing personal growth in terms of introductory level gathering of spectroscopic data and its analysis. I am pursuing knowledge and skill to transform my theoretical understandings of astronomy into practical real-world, data-driven inquiries for my students… variable star observing, color imaging, astrometric tracking of asteroids, etc.
• The NITARP experience provides the highest quality environment of building on the existing, limited, knowledge and skill sets of both teachers and students while challenging both in terms of both their depth and breadth. But more importantly, because it is real-world science carried out in collaboration with a team of both professionals and amateurs, it is a develops the personal perception of the participants of themselves as already being on the spectrum of what a scientist is and does… seeing themselves moving persistently along that spectrum toward a more knowledgeable and skilled place… and developing the meaningful confidence in their ability to pursue the next steps to remain engaged in STEM inquiry in the future. Participants have a personal and accurate first-person knowledge of what a career in STEM might require… which helps them to refine and define their own academic and professional development goals for the future. And, the engaging way in which this is accomplished creates new participants in the pipeline to professional participation in, and support of, the STEM disciplines.
• I always wanted to publish, as I said in my original application to the program. Somehow, being exposed to the papers in this most recent literature search, and realizing that writing papers is part of your lives, finally got me moving. Now, just today in fact, I sent off my first peer-reviewed paper with what should be the last round of editorial revisions! So, thank you for normalizing publishing to me.
• The main resources [we used] were the image data set that are available via the IPAC and other resources for our archival work. This combined with the tools that are integrated to allow easy searching for, processing of, sorting, summarizing, etc of the information was amazing. This combined with the ability of our professional astronomer to allow the space for us to experience the learning curve for what is available, how to get it, manipulate it, summarize it, analyze it and then to finalize all of that with the magic mojo of coding to crunch all of that into code to crank out hundreds of products ready for the next steps in the process was so impressive and empowering. I may not have the time to become a coder, but I appreciate the talent and skill that it brings to the science more so now that I have completed NITARP.

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