Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

A new government funded program to help students pay for science and engineering education, Get SMART:

The Pentagon’s new and generous scholarship program aims to bolster the number of top students who are earning degrees in so-called STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—and acquiring skills it considers key to the nation’s future security. Called the Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Defense Scholarship program, the Pentagon wants to ensure there’s a pool of talented researchers available to U.S. defense labs so they can continue their critical work for decades to come. That’s why for every year they receive the scholarship, Lopez and her fellow SMART recipients have agreed to work an equal amount of time at a government defense lab upon graduation.
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[SMART] scholars spend summers working as interns at [Department of Defense] labs. Each is assigned a mentor, one of the lab’s senior researchers, to help guide them through their studies and their lab work. Their lab assignments are tailored as much as possible to coincide with their current coursework. Lopez’s mentor, for instance, is Richard A. Albanese, the lead scientist in the Information Operations and Special Projects Division at the Air Force Research Laboratory located at Brooks Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. His applied mathematics team specializes in signal processing and advanced electronic systems with special interest in antenna synthesis.