Goldwater scholarships for the Pure Gold

If you attend MSU, chances are you’ve heard of the Goldwater Scholarship. From prospective student recruiting to weekly newsletters, MSU is vocal about the scholarship and the many recipients at our university. If you’re like me, however, you may not know exactly what the Goldwater Scholarship is, who it’s named for or why it is so important to our university.

Barry Goldwater, born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1909, served in the military for over 25 years and represented Arizona in the United States Senate from 1953 to 1987, taking a short leave in 1964 to lead an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency. Goldwater was also a talented amateur radio operator and photographer and held a great interest in the fields of mathematics and science. Near the end of his political career, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship was created by Congress in 1986 and has since awarded 7,680 scholarships to American undergraduates.

The Barry Goldwater Scholarship is awarded to college sophomores and juniors in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. According to the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation’s website, the scholarship is “The most prestigious undergraduate scholarship in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering in America.” While prestige is relative and non-quantifiable, the Goldwater Scholarship is certainly a highly-regarded and extremely competitive award and hundreds of universities across the country nominate students every year.

The competition for the scholarship is intense. Since the first Goldwater Scholarships were awarded in 1989, the lion’s share has been claimed by some of America’s most selective and distinguished institutions. The three universities with the most total awards are Harvard, Princeton and Stanford respectively. Interestingly enough, MSU, an institution with an acceptance rate nearly 20 times higher than Stanford’s, has earned 78 total scholarships, the 10th most in the nation. MSU’s 78 Goldwater Scholars are more than Johns Hopkins (77), MIT (76) and Yale (72), proving that it doesn’t take a $31 billion endowment to nurture brilliant scientists, mathematicians and engineers.

This year, four Bobcats, Laina Hall, Pushya Krishna, Elliot Pryor and Matthew Thompson, were awarded Goldwater Scholarships. No institution can have more than four Goldwater Scholars each year, and MSU has been awarded four scholarships for three years running.

Hall and Krishna’s research is focused on the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9, while Pryor studies machine learning and Thompson works on osteoarthritis treatment strategies. Through the scholarship, each student receives up to $7,500 for tuition and other school-related expenses. MSU has cemented its status as a breeding ground for talented young researchers in the STEM fields and we congratulate this year’s class of Goldwater Scholars at MSU.