Education
At Wilmington Conference Academy, Cannon was a promising student, particularly in mathematics. In 1880 Cannon was sent to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, one of the top academic schools for women in the U.S. The cold winter climate in the area led to repeated infections, and in one Cannon was stricken with scarlet fever. As a result, Cannon became almost completely deaf.
She graduated with a degree in physics in 1884 and returned home. Uninterested in the limited career opportunities available to women, she grew bored and restless. Her partial hearing loss made socializing difficult, and she was generally older and better educated than most of the unmarried women in the area. She had made a trip to Europe in 1892 to photograph the solar eclipse, but returned with her situation little improved.
In 1894, however, her mother died. Life in the home grew more difficult, and she finally wrote to her former instructor at Wellesley, Professor of Physics and Astronomy Sarah Frances Whiting, to see if there was a job opening. Whiting hired her as her assistant, which allowed Cannon to take graduate courses at the college. The school had started offering a course in astronomy, which became her true calling. While at Wellesley, Professor Whiting inspired her to learn about spectroscopy. Also during those years, Cannon developed her skills in the new art of photography.
She returned to Wellesley in 1894 for graduate study in physics and astronomy. In order to gain access to a better telescope, she decided to enroll at Radcliffe Women's College at Harvard, which had access to the Harvard College Observatory. In 1896, Edward C. Pickering hired Cannon as his assistant at the Harvard observatory. By 1907 she had received a MA from Wellesley.
Read more about this topic: Annie Jump Cannon
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“We have not been fair with the Negro and his education. He has not had adequate or ample education to permit him to qualify for many jobs that are open to him.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)