 Elite MSU students win NSF fellowships
Three students who received the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater
Scholarship while at Montana State University-Bozeman have now
won fellowships from the National Science Foundation.
Amanda Cundy of Bozeman, Carl Legleiter of Englewood, Colo. and
Kay Kirkpatrick of Dillon were already
Each one has now received a 2002 NSF Graduate Research
Fellowship. That gives them an annual stipend of $21,500 which
they can use any three years in a five-year period. It will also
pay up to $10,500 a year for tuition and fees.
"It comes as no surprise that these three outstanding Honors
students have achieved yet another academic distinction," said
Victoria O'Donnell, director of the University Honors Program at
MSU. "We saw their outstanding potential when they were awarded
Presidential Scholarships. Winning the Goldwater Scholarship and
now the National Science fellowship is the result of their
intelligence combined with a fine education at Montana State
University."
Cundy graduated with distinction last year in civil engineering
and the University Honors Program. She is currently a master's
degree student at Virginia Tech (VT) and plans to use the
fellowship to fund her work there next fall. After that, she
hopes to work at Los Alamos National lab for a couple of years.
She will then use the remainder of her fellowship to earn her
Ph.D., possibly in the United Kingdom or Australia.
The fellowship offers her freedom, Cundy said.
"I am no longer tied to a source of funding at VT or at Los
Alamos," she explained. "Without the NSF fellowship, I wouldn't
be thinking about studying abroad at all."
Legleiter, a senior in earth sciences and the University Honors
Program, will graduate with distinction in May. He plans to
attend graduate school in the fall, either at the University of
California Santa Barbara or the University of Colorado. He plans
to study the application of remote sensing technology to rivers
and streams.
"I'm truly honored to win this prestigious award because it is to
some extent a mark of approval from the scientific community that
my research ideas are worth pursuing and that I have the
potential to make a valuable contribution," Legleiter said.
"Also, winning this fellowship represents a way of validating the
effort I've put forth here at Montana State and confirming the
ability I've developed along the way."
Kirkpatrick, a senior in mathematics and the Honors Program, will
graduate this spring with highest distinction. She plans to use
her fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.
"It'll make it possible to live in that expensive town,"
Kirkpatrick said, adding, "The past couple years at MSU have been
awesome. My education here has exceeded my great expectations."
The NSF fellowships are designed to strengthen the science,
mathematics and engineering base in the United States and
increase its diversity. Recipients are expected to contribute
significantly to research, teaching or industrial applications in
those areas.
Among those receiving honorable mention for the fellowship were
John Bender, Deborah Sills and James Lewis Fox. Bender and Sills
graduated from MSU in 2001. Fox is currently a graduate student
in physics at MSU.
Posted by Evelyn Boswell for 4/1/02
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