{"id":2865,"date":"2014-04-22T17:35:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-22T21:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2014\/04\/22\/an-astronomical-achievement\/"},"modified":"2022-11-07T18:01:22","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T23:01:22","slug":"an-astronomical-achievement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/an-astronomical-achievement\/","title":{"rendered":"An astronomical achievement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Furman mathematics professor Liz Bouzarth is aware of multiple people who have applied for a National Science Foundation\u2019s Graduate Research Fellowship<\/a>. She\u2019s known exactly one to actually receive the prestigious award\u2014Furman senior Kristina Pardo.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeers of mine who are now professors, when they were in graduate school they were unsuccessful,\u201d Bouzarth said. \u201cI have written recommendation letters for students when I was teaching at Duke, and they didn\u2019t get it . . . She beat out some graduate students for this award. It\u2019s very impressive.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Graduate Research Fellowship Program \u201crecognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master\u2019s and doctoral degrees.\u201d More than 14,000 applied for the 2014 competition, but only 2,000 were offered awards that come with a $32,000 annual stipend for three years as well as a $12,000 cost-of-education allowance and XSEDE<\/a> supercomputer access.<\/p>\n

Pardo, a double math and physics major who has yet to even begin graduate school, got the news on April 1 and initially didn\u2019t believe her good fortune. \u201cNo!\u201d the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., native said when asked if she thought she had a chance to win. \u201cI honestly applied thinking this is going to be good practice for me and I\u2019ll try again next year because I think I\u2019ll have a better chance. I wasn\u2019t expecting anything . . . I really didn\u2019t think it was real for a second. It was April Fool\u2019s Day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Applicants\u2019 hopes rest largely on their proposed research plan, which is something undergraduate students generally haven\u2019t formulated all that clearly. Pardo, however, spent last summer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Summer Research Program studying black hole theory, and while the details are \u201ca little bit hard to explain succinctly\u201d the work she did and the direction she hopes to go with it when she begins pursuit of her Ph.D. in astrophysics at Princeton impressed the NSF.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was huge for me. That\u2019s where I really found I love research,\u201d Pardo said. \u201cI\u2019ve never worked so hard on something. I never thought I could work so hard. It showed me that grad school is the right option for me and I am in the right field.\u201d<\/p>\n

That kind of focus is rare, Bouzarth says. \u201cIf you\u2019re an undergraduate sitting in college thinking about graduate school it\u2019s hard enough to pick a graduate school and decide what field to start studying, let alone pick a research project.\u00a0 The task on the NSF side is they have to compare somebody who\u2019s going into a math project with somebody who\u2019s going into astrophysics or chemistry or biology. It\u2019s great news for her, and for Furman.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Furman Scholars program<\/a> coupled with a music scholarship lured her to South Carolina, but Pardo discovered she may not like music as much as she thought right around the time she found out math wasn\u2019t so bad after all.<\/p>\n

\u201cI liked math a lot when I was little, and I stopped liking it kind of around middle school because of really bad teachers,\u201d Pardo said. \u201cI was in Dr. (John) Harris\u2019 160 class<\/a>, which is a class you need for your physics major, and I realized that I actually did like math. He was just so good and he\u2019s such a nice person and he was so happy to teach this stuff. He was just so excited about it, and I think that\u2019s what got me excited too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve known her since she came as a freshman, and she was special from the beginning,\u201d Harris says. \u201cShe has always been the kind of student that you really like to have in class because she\u2019s engaged in the classroom and outside of the classroom, too. She\u2019s bright and she\u2019s motivated and she\u2019s interested in lots of different things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, Pardo, a bassoon player, recently played her last concert as a Furman student and counts the East of the Rhine study abroad program led by professors Michael Bressler and Tim Fehler as perhaps her favorite Furman experience. But now it\u2019s time to focus on one thing\u2014albeit a pretty big thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m interested in cosmology, the history of the universe, but I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m going to end up doing,\u201d she said. \u201cI definitely want to do theoretical work, work with math and computers basically. Not too much actual practical stuff. I tend to break things.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a complete list of winners, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Furman mathematics professor Liz Bouzarth is aware of multiple people who have applied for a National Science Foundation\u2019s Graduate Research Fellowship. She\u2019s known exactly one to actually receive the prestigious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":13368,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,50,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-mathematics","category-physics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}