Abstract
Two people strongly influenced my intellectual (and, ultimately, professional) development during my early years—my father, Walter Wolff, and my biology teacher, Paul Brandwein. These influences were not independent of each other. As I learned recently (although perhaps I knew it when I was in high school), Paul Brandwein’s first job as a high school teacher of biology was in the department my father chaired. The two of them created such a united front that it never occurred to me at the time to ponder what I might like to do with my life.
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From 1942 to 1948, the Search divided participants by gender, choosing two top winners, one from the “girls” group and one from the “boys” (Phares, 1990).
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The building and its amenities reflected the austerity of the war years. For example, we had no swimming pool—a circumstance that I remember vividly because we had to take “dry land swimming” to satisfy New York State regulations.
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Many current Search participants not only make such contributions as students but also go on to make important scientific breakthroughs as adults.
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Editor’s note from the 21st century: The Wolffs’ rejection of traditional scientific careers is not unusual. Science PhDs (often with significant postdoctoral work as well) who were trained in the hope of obtaining faculty positions at PhD-granting universities are often not finding such positions. The widely accepted (and as it turns out inaccurate) prediction some years back of an upcoming shortfall of American scientists destined for such positions turned instead into a glut (see “Do We Need More Scientists?” [Teitelbaum, 2003]).
If they are willing to take jobs in non-research-oriented colleges, or in industrial or governmental laboratories—or in the Wolffs’ cases and those of a few other of Brandwein’s high school science students, different fields altogether—their rigorous scientific habits can become valuable assets indeed.
Because of their difficulty in finding jobs suitable to their scientific training (bachelor’s level engineering and computer science students excepted), some science majors choose a professional master’s program instead of an advanced research degree to combine “advanced science/mathematics high-level communication and technical skills and a working knowledge of business principles” (Tobias & Sims, 2006).
References
Phares, Tom K. (1990). Seeking—and finding—science talent: A 50-year history of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Pittsburgh, PA: Westinghouse Corporation.
Teitelbaum, Michael S. (2003, Fall). Do we need more scientists? The Public Interest, 153, 40–53.
Tobias, Sheila, and Sims, Leslie B. (2006, August). Training science and mathematics professionals for an innovation economy: The emergence of the professional science master’s in the USA. Industry & Higher Education, 20(4), 263–267.
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Fort, D.C. (2010). Paul Brandwein’s Influence on My Life. In: One Legacy of Paul F. Brandwein. Classics in Science Education, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2528-9_5
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