Sol Reisberg, a chemistry and math double major, chose Kenyon because he wanted to develop excellent communication skills while getting a superb science education. Now he's gotten something else he dreamed about: a prestigious Goldwater scholarship. Reisberg was one of only 282 students nationally to be named a 2012 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar, the premier undergraduate honor for students planning research careers in the sciences, mathematics, or engineering, valued at $7,500 per year.

A native of Portland, Oregon, Reisberg pursues research on the development of renewable plastics in the lab of chemistry professor Yutan Getzler, his mentor. His research falls at the boundary of three subfields-environmental chemistry, materials science, and organo-metallic chemistry-providing him with broad experience. He plans to earn a Ph.D. in organo-metallic or organic chemistry, and is tempted by careers in both industry and academia.

Reisberg's research is ideally suited to his temperament. He has always excelled at abstract mathematics but wanted to study something with a useful application. As a teenager, Reisberg worked in a Portland software engineering firm that developed long-distance educational software. He enjoyed seeing mathematical knowledge turned into a product and, at the same time, discovered the value of communication skills. "The educators knew what they wanted but not how to say it in a language understood by programmers. I saw a gap I could fill," he said, bridging the two because he spoke both their languages.

"I chose Kenyon because I wanted to develop my written and oral communication skills within a great science program. Kenyon is known for that," he said. "You can get a top science education in other places, but for science plus language skills you need a liberal arts education, and Kenyon is among the top liberal arts colleges."

His relationship with Professor Getzler has been another boon of coming to Kenyon. "Our relationship is amazing," he says. "He's my professor, but we're also very close friends. We share the same musical taste, and he invites me to Friday night dinners at his house with his family." Although Getzler does not share Reisberg's hobby of glass-blowing, they both love spending time in the outdoors. "As an advisor in the lab, he fosters the right level of independence," says Reisberg. "He helps me figure out where I want to go, and he grants me freedom to get there. He encourages what I'm interested in, even if it's not the most direct route to the result."

Reisberg finds Kenyon ideal for a science kid because of the close relationships with faculty and the opportunity to get into a research lab early in your college career. But what sets Kenyon apart, in his mind, is the communication of writing skills. "People at Kenyon are surprised by how much they write, across the board," he says. His own writing has been developed as much by economics professors Corrigan and Trethewey as by professors Getzler and Hofferberth in the chemistry department. Most of all, he's grateful for the early experience in a research lab that's open to science students at Kenyon from day one. "In real science there's no recipe, and there's rarely a glorious eureka moment. It's more like: you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, and then one day there's a moment when things sort of work a little. And you get a lot of joy from that 2 percent success. I love inching up this wall."

This summer Reisberg holds a paid internship with Dow Agrosciences in Indianapolis developing fungicides. "I know what an academic career might look like. But I'm thinking about a career in industry and want to know what a day in the life of an industrial chemist is like." He hopes this internship will help him decide the direction of his career.

"If I had to define Kenyon culture, I'd say it's intensely intellectual, non-competitive, and heterogeneous," Reisberg said. He also finds it intensely social and has several circles of friends, including history and art history majors. "We have fun, but for us having fun means not shutting off our brains. Coming home from a party one night at 2:00 a.m., a bunch of us were having this intense rhetorical debate about Dante. That's an only-at-Kenyon moment, where academics never escape the mind. I loved it."