AAS - 2012

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 2011 and 2012 NITARP teams attended the 2012 January AAS meeting in Austin, TX. The 2011 class was presenting results and the 2012 class was starting up. We sent about 60 people to the AAS (the largest delegation to date) and had a grand time. Please see the special article on NITARP at the AAS. We also got a smattering of coverage in local media outlets.

Quotes

I think that the most surprising thing about it was how young everyone was! I absolutely did not expect that, maybe because the amateur community is so much older by comparison, and is mainly composed of retired people.
This experience convinced me even further that I can push myself to learn even more each and every day. I started out feeling very overwhelmed and unprepared last year. I forced myself to work through my unease and wound up much more comfortable. I learned that astronomers are much more down-to-earth than I envisioned a lot of them to be and so many of them are very willing to go out of their way to explain things when we have questions.
[student:] The most interesting thing I learned is that astronomy is such a huge field. There are so many things that you can research. [..]whatever you find in your research, astronomers want to know about it.
Astronomers all have different career paths and can do multiple different things with their work.
[student:] I came to appreciate the fact that there will always be someone smarter than I am, and that's okay because I can learn from them. I also came to appreciate the ability of good public speaking.

AAS - 2012

Quotes

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