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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

  • The NITARP experience is guided by Jedi Masters… they perceive the force and guide it to flow through the process in harmony with the dynamic interactions between the science, the data, the people, and the products that all need to dance together to achieve a meaningful result. The impact on the participants of NITARP is significant, measurable, positive and spiritually inspiring. We come out the “other side” of the NITARP experience a changed person in ways that we never could have created on our own… so THANK YOU, Thank You, thank you for the wonderful opportunity that is NITARP.
  • 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.
  • It was transformative to carry a project all the way through from “Yah, IC417… that sounds like it could be cool” to the representation of scientifically valid results in our AAS poster and the publication of a catalog of 512 new candidate YSOs. Some small piece of the collective knowledge of astronomy was produced by our team. That is empowering personally, but more importantly it is transformative for the conversations I can have with my students (in and out of NITARP). These conversations have made the occupational choice of astronomer be more “real” for the students, and thus has increased the number that are actively entering into undergraduate programs thinking that astrophysics is for them as a career.
  • 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:] I have always wanted to be an engineer, and although NITARP hasn’t changed that ultimate goal, it has given me an extreme passion for research. Now, I want to get involved with undergraduate research as soon as possible in college, and without NITARP, I don’t think that interest would have emerged.

Related Teams

AAS - 2022