On our Provost’s website, FSU lists faculty who have won the Nobel Prize, a Pulitzer, a Guggenheim, or a Fulbright. We also list members elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Even if you are not in academia, you probably recognize these as major awards for talented and accomplished people and most faculty agree they are so. It is after this short list that the relevance of awards gets murky.
I am a humanist by training – Ph.D. in American Literature. The Pulitzer and the Guggenheim would make a career in the Humanities. But so would a MacArthur, a National Book Award, an American Academy of Learned Societies Fellowship, or, possibly, a great review in the New York Times. The joy of awards in-field is that one’s peers have agreed your work is valuable, noteworthy, meritorious. And this acknowledgment translates. I may not understand the subtle differences between the IEEE Richard M. Emberson Award and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, but I do understand that both are highly competitive professional recognitions. What is even better is that the members of IEEE do know the difference.
It is our job (and our joy) at a Research I institution to educate each other on what we do specifically (How can there be any more to say on American modernism and race post WWI? What are microelectronics? ) and how we know who is doing it well.
So, what award matters most to you? Which of your mentors will you nominate for it this year?
