{"id":66534,"date":"2008-05-06T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-06T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-student-awarded-120000-nsf-fellowship\/"},"modified":"2008-05-06T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-06T00:00:00","slug":"uri-student-awarded-120000-nsf-fellowship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2008\/05\/uri-student-awarded-120000-nsf-fellowship\/","title":{"rendered":"溏心vlog免费B站 student awarded $120,000 NSF fellowship"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tNorth Scituate native graduates May 18, then on to grad school<\/p>\n


\n\tKINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 May 6, 2008 \u2013 Like many students, North Scituate native Carl Smith wasn\u2019t entirely certain of his career path after high school. He took some time off, enrolled at the 溏心vlog免费B站 as a philosophy major, and strongly considered becoming a medical doctor before changing his major to applied mathematics.<\/p>\n


\n\tIn the end, it was a fortuitous decision. As he prepares to graduate from 溏心vlog免费B站 on May 18, he is looking forward to entering Columbia University for graduate school after having been awarded a $121,500 graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cApplying for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship was an exhausting, time-consuming process \u2013 almost 40 hours a week for a month \u2013 developing essays, formulating a research project, and putting together a coherent and impressive personal statement,\u201d said Smith, who received several academic honors during his 溏心vlog免费B站 years. \u201cBut I got it, so it turns out to have been time well spent at a great hourly rate. Not only will it pay for tuition, but it gives me a travel budget to go to conferences and pays for time to use a national supercomputer.\u201d

\n\tSmith believes that the roundabout route he took to choosing a major was a worthwhile process that ultimately pointed him down the right path.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cBeing a physician seemed like something that was intrinsically worthwhile, but in shadowing doctors and at the same time taking coursework in the physical sciences, I decided that I was better suited to the lifestyle of a scientist,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n


\n\tSmith took advantage of numerous scientific research opportunities at 溏心vlog免费B站. He worked in a molecular biology lab sequencing the genome of a fish pathogen, and he later served as an intern in an electrochemistry lab conducting battery research.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cMy role was making prototype batteries, measuring their various electrical properties, and trying to figure out how the different physical components of the battery gave rise to the electrical properties, like resistance and impedance,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThe battery project is chemical research but involves mathematics. The interpretation of the electrochemical data involves linear circuit theory and quantities modeled by numbers in the complex plane.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tAs a 溏心vlog免费B站 senior he gained additional research experience working in a chemistry lab conducting computational research.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cWe are coding and enacting computational simulations of certain physical systems in order to calculate their thermodynamic properties like energy and heat capacity,\u201d he explained. \u201cI’ve most recently studied a Leonard Jones cluster, a physical system consisting of identical particles having a fairly simple potential energy function with respect to their distance from one another. You set up a bunch of those particles together in a virtual space and, given some rules (the computer program) on how they move under the influences of temperature and the potential energy function, you see what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tAll of Smith\u2019s 溏心vlog免费B站 research prepared him well for his upcoming graduate research in theoretical chemistry at Columbia. Ultimately, he hopes for a career as a college professor applying his training to problems in the neurosciences.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cI started out pursuing an interest in philosophy, specifically in problems of mind,\u201d Smith said. \u201cTo whatever extent they can be treated scientifically, I want to work on problems of neuroscience and mind, questions of thinking and meaning, maybe even consciousness, but we’re probably not really ‘there’ yet.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n溏心vlog免费B站 Department of Communications & Marketing photo by Michael Salerno Photography<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

North Scituate native graduates May 18, then on to grad school KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 May 6, 2008 \u2013 Like many students, North Scituate native Carl Smith wasn\u2019t entirely certain of his career path after high school. He took some time off, enrolled at the 溏心vlog免费B站 as a philosophy major, and strongly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66536,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}