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AAS - 2022

The Winter American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting is usually 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 2020/21 and 2022 NITARP teams had planned to attend the 2022 January AAS meeting in Salt Lake City, UT. However, the meeting was entirely cancelled due to COVID. We still have this special article about the NITARP teams finishing and starting up. All of the posters from the 2020/21 teams we presented are here. Most of the 2020/21 teams came instead to the June 2022 AAS meeting in Pasadena, CA instead. Those posters were iPosters, so the PDF versions that are here are still the versions from Jan 2022, but the numbers are from June 2022.

The 2022 class got started on Jan 9, just before when the winter AAS would have been held. There are two teams in 2022.

Quotes

  • ...learn enough to answer 80% of your questions while recognizing 10 new ones, and getting just enough data found, crunched, visualized, considered and understood to still not quite have caught up with your goals. But that is science… the real-world, messy, challenging, inspiring world of science. Embrace your curiosity, embrace the opportunity to question and to explore, embrace the 80% success that you will achieve because that, along with the remaining 20% you will never get to, is what the next scientists in the line will be able to pick up and run with as the data that drives their inquiry. You are scientists in a long line of scientist that have been, are, and shall always be… so have FUN with it!
  • [student:] One important thing NITARP has taught me is when working in a group environment, disseminate work to other people rather than trying to take on the whole load of the project by myself. In NITARP, it would’ve been impossible for one person to do all of the work, and splitting everything up made the whole project work more effectively and efficiently. I am going to try and carry this strategy into other group work I do in school.
  • Look at where my kids are now. Their resumes are leaps and bounds better. Their confidence in talking with other students, teachers, and scientists has gone off the charts. We really changed their paths.
  • 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.
  • [student:] Previously, I did not entirely understand how versatile the data collected by telescopes are. Astronomers can utilize data and surveys that were created for a specific purpose for a completely different purpose. I didn't realize this before NITARP.

Related Teams

AAS - 2022