Meanwhile…
Meanwhile, as seniors will and must, we were assessing our options for life after MIT. I’d pretty well come to the realization that I didn’t want to be a physicist by trade: it sufficed to have learned the language and to have earned a credential that people wouldn’t be inclined to ignore.

And then there was the idea of a career in education. My parents had set an example of lifelong dedication to that field as a profession and as a cause, and I felt something like a hereditary affinity for it. My patriarchal blessing said I was to be a teacher in all the world. And I fell in with some physicists who expressed interesting ideas about revitalizing science education in these days of Cold War competition. Went to a seminar with Philip Morrison, who regaled us with tales of the Manhattan Project, and others with Jerrold Zacharias; both were by then well into the PSSC physics curriculum project. As was Professor George Whipple Clark, a distinguished astrophysicist, I’m told, although our interactions were never really in that realm.
Looking around for graduate-school opportunities that might combine my preparation in physics with opportunities to become an educator, I applied to a program called Shell Merit Fellowships, sponsored by the Shell Oil folks, which offered graduate fellowships to National Merit Scholars. Specifically, as I recall, to those who wanted to go into science education, although that may just have been the corner that caught my eye. Turned out that they had situations on offer at Stanford and Cornell. Applied to both. Also, mainly for the sake of family nostalgia, applied to the Ph.D. program in physics at Brigham Young University (not connected with the Shell program, nor with the ed. biz.). All three accepted me.

So, as they say, we had a family council, pregnant Valerie and I. Having decided against physics itself as a career path, we were left with the two Shell options. I was leaning toward Cornell, but Valerie was really tired of cold winters (after one, count it, one) in the northeast. And as a lifelong Californian, she was pretty strongly drawn by the Left Coast. So that’s how we ended up in a twelve-month master’s program at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
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