Module 2 Unit 1 a Look at Washington University

This is the VOA Special English Education Report. A student at Xinjiang Normal University in China has a question for our Foreign Student Series. Akbar Mamat wants to go overseas after graduation and would like some information about Washington University.

Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, is a medium-sized school in the Midwest. It has almost eleven thousand students. Twelve percent this last school year were international students, mostly graduate students. The university has schools for law, medicine and social work. It also has a business school, a school of design and visual arts and a school of engineering and applied science. But more than seventy percent of courses are taught through the Arts and Sciences program.

The new school year that begins this fall will cost fifty-two thousand dollars for undergraduates. That includes twelve months of living expenses estimated at seventeen thousand dollars. Graduate tuition differs by program. Tuition for the Master of Social Work program, for example, will cost twenty-seven thousand dollars in the coming year. The Master of Business Administration program will cost about thirty-eight thousand dollars.

The university offers financial assistance to international students, including first-year students, but says its resources are limited. Scholarships are available. The university also offers a monthly payment plan to spread out the cost of tuition. And it offers loan programs.

International students in the United States generally cannot receive federal student loans. But they may be able to take out private loans, as many American students do. The student loan industry is in the news right now. Investigations are looking at questionable dealings between colleges and lenders.

Washington University in Saint Louis was named Eliot Seminary when it opened in eighteen fifty-three. Later the name was changed to honor the first American president, George Washington. But other schools share the name Washington, including the University of Washington and George Washington University. So in nineteen seventy-six Washington University added the words "in Saint Louis" to its name.

And that's the VOA Special English Education Report, written by Nancy Steinbach. Our Foreign Student Series on higher education in the United States is online at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Steve Ember.

(http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/archive/2007-06/2007-06-20-voa2.cfm)

Module 2 Unit 1

Speaker 1 Sylvia Earle Biologist

(2.2) I grew up more or less fearless with respect to all sorts of things -- spiders, squirrels, birds, mammals -- because of the gentleness that both my father and my mother and my family in general expressed toward our fellow citizens on the planet. That empathy for living things became naturally expanded as I grew up into a study of living things. I became a biologist just following my heart, I suppose. I couldn't imagine wanting to do anything else.

(2.3) When asked as a child "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I didn't know exactly what to call it, but I did know that I wanted to do something that related to plants and animals. I think for a while I entertained the thought that maybe I wanted to be a veterinarian. I knew about veterinarians, and I loved cats and dogs and horses, and all the traditional kinds of creatures that human beings surround themselves with. But I was increasingly interested, fascinated, and really enchanted by the wild creatures. As I grew older and learned more about them, I think I determined that was the direction I would be taking.

(2.4) Well, I say that I worked when I went through school, but it wasn't to me work. It was really a source of pleasure. I worked as a laboratory assistant, and it was throwing me right into the midst of the very people that I wanted to be with. And never mind that I was washing glassware, and whipping up banana medium to feed the fruit flies and things and things of that sort. I found it just that... that I was with the people I most admired. It gave me an entree. It gave me experience. It gave me acceptance with them - I became the lowliest member of the team, but part of the team.

Speaker 2 Linus Pauling Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Peace

(2.5) When I was 11 years old, I became interested in insects -- entomology. And for a year I read books about insects and collected specimens of butterflies and beetles in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. When I was 12, I became interested in rocks and minerals. I couldn't collect very many; there wasn't a good source of minerals except agates, but I read a great deal about minerals. Then when I was 13, I became interested in chemistry in these remarkable phenomena in which one substance is converted into another substance, or two substances react to produce a third substance with quite different properties. Then when I was 18, in 1919, when I was teaching quantitative analysis full time at Oregon Agricultural College for one year between my sophomore and junior years, I read the papers of Irving Langmuir in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, in 1919 and went back to G.N. Lewis's 1916 paper. These papers dealing with the nature of the chemical bond, the role of electrons in holding atoms together interested me very much. That has been, essentially, the story of my life ever since.

(2.6) So far as my scientific career goes, of course, there was the decision that I made in 1945 -- '46 perhaps, but starting in 1945 -- and that may have been made by my wife rather than me, to sacrifice part of my scientific career to working for control of nuclear weapons and for the achievement of world peace. So, for years I devoted half my time, perhaps, to giving hundreds of lectures and to writing my book, No More War, but in the earlier years especially, to studying international affairs and social, political and economic theory, to the extent that it enabled me ultimately to feel that I was speaking with the same authority as when I talked about science. This is what my wife said to me back around 1946. If I wanted to be effective, I'd have to reach the point where I could speak with authority about these matters and not just quote statements that politicians and other people of that sort had made.

Speaker 3 Donna Shirley Mars Exploration Program

(2.7) I always wanted to fly airplanes, from the time I was very small. And when I was six, a friend of mine, a girlfriend, and I had this plan. She was going to be a nurse and I was going to be a bush pilot and we were going to fly into the outback and rescue people. And that was our objective. So, I built model airplanes and hung them from the ceiling and had a lot of books about airplanes. And then, when I was 10, we went to my uncle's graduation from medical school and on the program it said, aeronautical engineering. I asked my mother what that was and she said, "Oh, that's people who build airplanes." I said, "That's what I want to be." And so, that's when I decided that I was going to be an aeronautic engineer.

(2.8) When I was 12 or so I started reading science fiction. And, I read Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars, and Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, and Heinlein's books about Mars, and just got completely fascinated with the idea of Mars and going into space and space travel. And so, when I got to college, there really wasn't a space program. I got to college in 1958 and that was the year that Explorer One was orbited, following Sputnik. And so, you really couldn't specialize in space, nobody knew how to do it. And so, I ended up still working on airplanes.

(2.9) I signed up for 19 hours. The normal load was 15, but I wanted to take flying. And so, I signed up for this flying class, in addition to a fairly heavy course load. And plus, I'm good at taking multiple choice tests, which was the entrance exam for school. And so, they put me in advanced chemistry and calculus and all these advanced classes, and I was woefully unprepared for them. So, with the heavy course load, flying took a lot of time. So, I really didn't do very well for at least the first eight weeks. And in fact, I was flunking and my parents came up and, oh my gosh, you know, "Can we get you a tutor? What can we do?" So I went home over Christmas and just studied the whole time, and pulled out a B average that semester. But it was pretty hairy.

Speaker 4 Leon Lederman Nobel Prize in Physics

(2.10) When I was a kid, it was science, it was very romantic activities, I read newspaper articles about scientists. It turned out to be physics in retrospect, I didn't know it at the time, I couldn't spell it. I read a book by Einstein, for kids, he wrote it for kids. It was called The Meaning of Relativity - wonderful book. He compared science with a detective story, where you have clues, and the scientist as detective, trying to put things together. False clues, you got to check up on them, make sure they're right. That was a big impression.

(2.11) (My brother) liked to do experiments. He would collect all kinds of equipment -- electricity, chemicals from the drug store. Occasionally, somehow he'd get hold of a chemistry set, and we had a flash of opulence. And he loved to do things, and he'd make things work, and I loved to watch him, and I think that was a strong influence on me. It sort of introduced me to things and how they work, and that was impressive. So I think that he probably disposed me toward chemistry, and in high school the chemistry teachers were more fun. So there I was a chemist.

(2.12) I had spent three years in the army, and the first year in graduate school a tough one, because I had forgotten how to study, and I wasn't doing that well, and the classes were very crowded. The professors were just getting back from their own war work, and didn't have much time for counseling. And so I was sort of at loose ends, and depressed, and my course work was poor, and I went around looking for my old college friends -- who were either in graduate school or already had graduated -- to get support, and they supported me. I remember trying to -- several of them were clustered up at MIT, and they said "Why don't you transfer here, and we'll help you?" So I tried to, but my early grades were so bad I couldn't get into MIT. People at MIT are a little embarrassed about that now.

(Adapted from: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/halls/sci)