Science and Engineering Scholarships and Fellowships Blog

A very interesting article by William Blanpied explores the history of The National Science Foundation Class of 1952

A theme evident in a large number of responses had to do with the significance of the NSF fellowship in permitting recipients to concentrate on study and research by freeing them from teaching or research assistantship obligations. Several respondents also noted that their fellowships allowed them to change their research directions. Burton Richter, Director Emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and a Nobel Laureate in Physics, recalled that as a student at MIT, he was working, “on an experiment [at the National Magnet Laboratory] to determine the hyperfine structure of the radioactive mercury isotopes. My job was to make the radioactive mercury isotopes, which I did by a kind of inverse alchemy turning gold into mercury using the MIT cyclotron.

I began to find myself more interested in what was going on at the cyclotron laboratory than in what was going on with my experiment. As my interest grew, I decided that perhaps I should change fields. I went off to spend three months at Brookhaven seeing what particle physics was like. I found I loved it and on return transferred to the synchrotron laboratory and began working in the direction that I have pursued ever since.”

“It may be that I could have done all of this with a normal graduate research assistantship but it would certainly have been more difficult. I would have had to find a professor who was willing to spend his own research money to give a young student an opportunity to try out some different area.”