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Undergraduate Awards
 

Department Awards
 

Each year the department recognizes its most active and able undergraduate students via two or three awards which are bestowed annually at a Special Departmental Colloquium usually held toward the end of the Spring semester.

The first of these is induction into Sigma Pi Sigma (S P S ), the National Honorary Fraternity of the Society for Physics Students. For induction, students must have completed 90 hours of course work, maintained a 3.00 GPA, and have demonstrated a strong and hopefully abiding interest in Physics. We are pleased to list here, the names of inductees for the past and current year.

The second of these is the Guenter Schwarz Memorial Scholar Award, which is given to an outstanding physics major who has additionally demonstrated a keen interest in the areas of music, literature, art, dance, and/or student government. Dr. Schwarz was a past faculty member who had a special interest in the arts and made significant early contributions to the undergraduate program in Physics at FSU. There is a modest financial honorarium attached to this award.

Recent recipients of this award include:

Juliette Victoria (03-04) – Degree in Music.
Jose Valery (04-05) – Classical Guitar.

Our third award, the Dirac-Hellman Award, was recently endowed by Dr. Bruce Hellman, a former student of Paul A.M. Dirac, one of the founders of modern physics, and a former Florida State University faculty member. The purpose of the award is to recognize an exceptional piece of theoretical work performed by either an undergraduate or a graduate student. The Dirac-Hellman Award carries a $250 honorarium.

Starting Spring 2003, the Lynn Shannon Proctor award is given to a rising junior/senior woman student in physics. This award is given in honor of Ms. Proctor who was majoring in physics at the time of her death.

Danielle Stroup (2005)
Rhiannon Meharchand (2006)

National Awards

In addition to departmental awards, undergraduate physics majors at Florida State compete successfully for awards and scholarships at the national level. For example, a number of our students are Merit Scholar Finalists who receive scholarships from the state of Florida to support their undergraduate work. The record of our students in the competition for the prestigious national Goldwater Scholarship is one that the Department of Physics is particularly proud of. These scholarships are for juniors and seniors committed to research in the sciences or mathematics. Only two hundred and fifty of these are awarded nationally each year. The stipends may be as high as $7,500 per year. Florida State students have received 13 of these awards since 1990. Nine of them have been physics majors.

Will Huttner, Darren Oldsen, and Gabriel Bouch also majored in mathematics while Minesh Bacrania also majored in meteorology. We hope that this record will be extended in the future.

Keenan Pepper received Honorable Mention in the Goldwater competition in 2007.