COMPETITION AND ITS REWARDS
Some of you can look forward to enjoying within the next several years a thrilling experience.
Some morning in May you will bid your parents farewell, walk up the steps of an airliner, and touch down a few hours later in a distant city. For the next five days you will be caught up in the excitement and fascination of the National Science Fair-International!
The full impact of your nation’s science fair hits you the morning you set up your exhibit in the auditorium. You knew that you had a good exhibit when you entered the district fair back home in March. (Since this is your second year of serious competition, and you have improved both your science project and your exhibit, you weren’t too surprised to win there.) But regional and statewide competition is even tougher, so you were holding your breath until they finally called your name!
Now here you are, and as you appraise the 400 other exhibits going up besides yours, you realize this is the “big league”. These guys and gals are really good. But some of your awe evaporates as you talk with your neighbors, and while you help the pretty blonde with the guppies position her heavy aquaria. Win or not, this is going to be fun!
And so it is—during the tension of the judging the next day, when you show your exhibit to the public the day after that, and throughout the tours of research laboratories and industrial processing plants that follow. In conversations with the judges, in the varied social contacts with more than 400 fellow exhibitors from the United States and several foreign countries, you get a fresh look at the rewards of serious scientific endeavor. One evening you listen enthralled by the startling concept being explained by one of the “big men” in science. You’ve seen his name and picture in newspapers, textbooks, and technical journals, and there he stands, talking seriously to you and your fellow exhibitors. As he explains a problem that has puzzled you, you begin to see science as a community of kindred minds where every serious truth-seeker is welcome, where there is no rank other than that bestowed on active intellects, sound procedures, and reasoned, honest conclusions.
All too soon, the week is almost over. At the Awards Banquet they are calling the names of the winners and you sit unsurprised when the early prizes pass you by. You’ve studied those winning exhibits, and you must acknowledge that they have the edge on yours—one because of the very unusual hypothesis posed and proved, the other because of the masterful clarity with which it explains the area of investigation.
But next they name the winners of special awards, presented by the American Chemical Society, The American Institute of Biological Sciences, the military departments, and similar organizations, for outstanding exhibits related to the programs of the sponsors. And here you are on the stage, having your photograph taken with the nine other winners of the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Special Awards!
After the banquet, the AEC representative explains to you that the AEC Special Award includes considerably more than the Certificate of Achievement you have just received.
First, a duplicate certificate will be sent to your principal for display among the school trophies. Then, in August you and your science teacher will fly to Chicago for a week as exciting and rewarding as the one you have just completed. You will be guests of the AEC’s Argonne National Laboratory—an outstanding center for nuclear research. Your group will spend several days behind the scenes in Argonne’s laboratories. You will visit outstanding research facilities and science museums in downtown Chicago. Best of all, you will have an opportunity to discuss your interests and career plans with members of the Argonne staff—men and women who are doing professional research in the same areas that interest you.
What are the costs of such an experience? Only the attention you pay to your science instruction; the thought and care you devote to a project related to nuclear science; and the clarity and ingenuity with which you explain that project to your classmates, teachers, and the general public through your science fair exhibit.
First Atomic Energy Commission Special Awards winners, selected at the 13th NSFI at Seattle, photographed during their Nuclear Research Orientation Week at the AEC’s Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in August 1962. High point of the week, winners report, is the opportunity—pictured here—to talk face-to-face with Argonne scientists who are working in areas of research of particular interest to each student visitor. Courtesy Argonne National Laboratory
1963 AEC Special Awards winners and their science teachers spent their Nuclear Research Orientation Week at Argonne National Laboratory. Top photograph is of Elizabeth Winstead of Jacksonville, Florida, whose prize-winning exhibit at Albuquerque is pictured on the cover. The photograph below hers is of William E. Murray, Jr., of Bethesda, Maryland, who was also an AEC Special Awards winner at Seattle in 1962. Courtesy Argonne National Laboratory