Why Should Science Majors Study Abroad?
by Professor W. H. (Bill) Breckenridge
Professor of Chemistry
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah
It seems almost like yesterday, but forty years ago I was finishing my bachelor's degree in chemistry at K.U. I had done pretty well, actually, and had been accepted into every major chemistry graduate Ph.D. program in the U.S., including Harvard and Stanford. But I had also applied for a Fulbright Fellowship for graduate study in chemistry for a year in England.
I came to K.U. as a naive kid from small-town Kansas (Louisburg), and because of a family background in the humanities (both my parents had degrees in English), as well as two exceptionally good high school English teachers who encouraged me, I had vague ideas about majoring in English myself at K.U. But then I took the first-semester Freshman Honors course in chemistry from F. S. (Sherry) Rowland, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery and interpretation of the stratospheric ozone layer problem with freon gases. I was hooked! (I had been interested in science in high school as well, and was selected to attend the Summer Science and Math Camp at K.U. in 1958, which greatly increased that interest). I ended up eventually being a chemistry major at K.U., and I did undergraduate research with Professor Rowland and his group, but I kept taking English and humanities courses until my senior year, when I finally decided it would be chemistry, not English, for me. I have never regretted that decision.
But my studies in the humanities (and in chemistry) had opened up a fascinating new intellectual world for me that I hadn't even imagined in a small-town high school atmosphere. So, I thought, what if I move even further from my "small town" academic roots, and go from a good state university like K.U. to a country like England, where the "groves of academe" had been flourishing for many centuries? It was an interesting (although perhaps still a naive) idea, but when I won the Fulbright Fellowship, I decided I'm gonna do this! This was despite the advice of some science professors who said it would just delay my getting my Ph.D. in chemistry by about a year. They were right, it did! But looking back on it now I am so glad I ignored their advice. I sailed on the Queen Mary (what an adventure for a kid from Kansas!) from New York to Southampton in August 1963, to begin my year as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Leeds in northern England.
This is supposed to be brief, so I will just say upfront that the Fulbright year totally changed my life. I worked in the labs of Professor Sir Fred Dainton, F.R.S. (Professor Dainton had been recommended by Professor Rowland), under the direct supervision of a wonderfully friendly and helpful young Australian academician, Dr. Don Baulch (we still correspond). I learned that year how to do research all on my own (in the field of physical chemistry which was to become my life's scientific work), and a paper was published on that research (I later found out that this was unusual for one year's work by a beginner like me...) I also learned, by "immersion' (there were probably only three or four Americans in the entire large, northern city of Leeds in 1963-64!), the English culture (including grooving on the Beatles, who hadn't yet journeyed to America), and saw some very interesting differences between the stratified upper to lower class structure in England and the huge, amorphous middle-class structure in America at the time, etc., etc. It is one thing to read about this sort of thing, but quite another thing to experience it first hand, by actually living in a foreign country. I was also able, in that Fulbright year, to travel to other parts of Europe as a student (sometimes with other Fulbrights in Europe from K.U. that year), further enriching my knowledge of different cultures (so many good stories, not enough space to tell them here!). Partially because of this Fulbright experience, after my Ph.D. work at Stanford University, I returned to England for a year in 1969 as a NATO postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University, and had another absolutely wonderful year -- Cambridge is a delightful city.
Finally, I have spent two sabbatical years in Germany and France (it is a different, and in many ways, much more enriching experience (although initially more difficult), to live in a country where the spoken language is not English). Again, so many stories... I have also established an on-going collaborative research relationship with scientists at Saclay, just outside Paris, and return for visits to Paris now essentially every year (hey, it's a tough job, but somebody has to do it!).
In conclusion, that Fulbright year in England in the early 1960's was very beneficial to me, both in enriching my cultural knowledge and broadening my views to global from provincially local (we need more of that, right now, I believe...). But it was also invaluable in giving me the desire and the abilities to establish fruitful international scientific collaborations, which have helped my scientific career. One example will suffice. In 1983, I had a scientific idea which I thought could be very important, but it required doing some new experiments in an area in which I had no expertise. A French scientist (my now close friend and colleague Benoit Soep) had a similar idea, and was an expert in this other area, but he had not done experiments in my area of expertise, a knowledge of which was essential in interpreting his eventual results. It was a perfect collaboration (my visit to his labs in Paris in 1985), and we performed the first detailed, successful experiments, establishing a new area of science. The scientific paper we published on these ground-breaking experiments was ranked five years later among the top 100 papers in 1986 cited by other scientists in all areas of chemistry, which was pretty remarkable for a paper in a fairly basic, specialized area of physical chemistry. I think that without my earlier experiences of traveling to foreign countries to do science, this great break-through might never have occurred.
So if you are an undergraduate science major, think seriously about spending time at a university abroad. Not only will it broaden you culturally as a person, but it may also broaden your training and perspectives as a young scientist. Study abroad!
Please feel free to contact me if you are considering study abroad:
Phone: 801-581-8024; e-mail: breck@chem.utah.edu.
A sketch of the Rudigerhof cafe in Vienna, Austria. Submitted by John Schlueter, participant in the Architecture exchange in Stuttgart, Germany.
Jayhawks Abroad Fall 2003
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