Education
Upon the family’s return to Springfield, Rachel enrolled in Commercial High School, but her mother forced her to transfer to Central High School for a more traditional education.
Brown’s hard work and determination to go to college impressed Henriette F. Dexter, a friend of her grandmother, who decided to pay for Brown to attend Mount Holyoke College. Though she originally chose to major in history, she fell in love with chemistry, a strong field at Mount Holyoke, after taking a required science course. Brown earned her A.B. in chemistry and history in 1920.
After working as a laboratory assistant for some time, Brown eventually began her graduate work and earned an M.S. in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1921. She then taught for three years at the Frances Shimer School near Chicago, a school and junior college for girls.
After taking some language courses and chemistry at Harvard, Brown returned to the University of Chicago for additional graduate work in organic chemistry and bacteriology. After successfully completing her research project and the required course work in 1926, she submitted her Ph.D thesis. However, due to some complications in scheduling her oral examinations and the depletion of her savings, Brown was forced to leave Chicago without her Ph.D to find a job at the Division of Labor and Research in Albany, New York.
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Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)
“She gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)