User:Marissaarnett/sandbox

Edited the organization of the page as a substitute for the 1-2 sentences. (Changed the first Works heading to Themes. Changed the second Works heading to Bibliography, took out the Stories subheading, and made Short story collections, Novels, Other collections and Adaptations each subheadings of the Bibliography heading.)

(The education setting below will go between “early life” and “science fiction career”)

Education

The Bradley family returned to Chicago from Africa in March 1922, where, at the age of seven, Alice attended school for the first time. After a second trip to Africa in 1924, the Bradleys returned to Chicago during the summer, and by fall that same year, "ten-year-old Alice was sent to the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. The Lab School was a private school for Hyde Park intellectuals, an experimental teaching workshop set up by the educator John Dewey. Classes were small and loosely structured, and children learned by doing. There, Alice studied geography by making maps, learned Latin in conversation, and did science by building thermometers or estimating the latitude of Chicago."

In September 1929, when Alice was fourteen, she was sent to a finishing school called Les Fougeres in Lausanne, Switzerland. There, she learned how to ride horses, studied etiquette, and learned French. Two years later, she enrolled in a much smaller boarding school called Andrebrook in Tarrytown, New York. During her senior year, Alice and her mother Mary disagreed about the future of her own education. While Mary wanted her daughter to follow in her footsteps and attend Smith College, Alice wanted to experience a college education that incorporated more art and fewer academic subjects.

As a result of the disagreement between mother and daughter, they compromised on Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxvillve, New York. When Alice enrolled, in 1933, the school was a two-year college for women featuring "an arty, experimental program" and only allowed about three hundred students. Alice left Chicago in the fall to attend Sarah Lawrence and ended up excelling in her artwork and impressing her instructors and classmates.

When Alice married Princeton University student William Davey in 1934, the young couples' parents agreed the two needed to finish college before settling down together. Unfortunately, neither Sarah Lawrence nor Princeton allow married students to attend. In January, Davey and Alice left Chicago and drove to California with plans to start the spring semester at University of California Berkeley immediately. Unfortunately, "they tried and failed to finish college," although Alice completed courses in art and introductory psychology in her second year. After a dramatic and violent series of arguments, the Daveys left Berkeley for good in 1936. They repeated this pattern again in New York City, enrolling in classes at New York University in spring 1937, only to drop out after another fight two months later.

Alice divorced Davey in 1941, returning home to live with her parents and sitting in on art classes at the Art Institute. As the United States' entry into World War II became more likely, Alice decided to train as a pilot. She took flying lessons, despite the high cost of the training, but unfortunately had to leave flight school because her eyesight was unsatisfactory for flying planes. In May 1942, Congress established the Woman's Army Auxiliary Corps, and after waiting several months to determine if it was "the real thing," Alice enlisted in August. By November she had completed the month-long basic training program in Fort Des Moines, but promptly after completion of training and much to Alice's chagrin, the WAAC women were assigned to create Christmas cards. Soon after, she applied to Officer Candidate School. In late November, she began to study for her gold bars. In 1943, Alice graduated from Officer Candidate School and became a third officer.

Alice continued to pursue educational opportunities throughout the war. After reading a newspaper article about the British Royal Air Forces' new military specialty of photointerpretation, Alice began volunteering for the U.S. Army Air Forces' photointerpretation department, getting formally transferred to Air Force Photointelligence in December. However, the department decided that Alice needed formal training for her position. In February 1944, she reported to the Air Force Intelligence School at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in order to study photointerpretation, graduating in April.

After the war ended, Alice and her new husband, Huntington Sheldon, set out on a very different career path, requiring different skills than the two had gained during the War. In October 1947, the couple decided to try their hand at chicken farming and registered for a course in poultry farming at Rutgers University. Alice graduated from Rutgers with the highest grade point average in her class and was cited for being the "best poultry-man."

Some five years later, having determined that chicken farming was not the most promising career path, the Sheldons sold the hatchery and moved to Washington D.C., where they began work for the CIA. During 1954, after mentioning her experiences in Africa to a superior, Alice was sent to the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington for their "Summer Session on Contemporary Africa."

Alice left the CIA, however, and in January 1957, after considering graduate school and a degree in psychology, Alice paid her "twenty-year-old tuition bill" at Berkeley in order to apply to American University in Washington D.C. where she enrolled in courses to complete her undergraduate degree. Getting her degree took longer than she expected and she did not graduate from American University until June, though finally graduated in 1959 with the highest distinction. The very next fall, Alice moved to George Washington University, where the psychology department was more prestigious. Here, the Public Health Service granted her a fellowship -- Pre-doctoral Research Grant number 10,907 -- to work on research for her project on visual perception.

In spring 1963, Alice finished her coursework at George Washington University and began work on her dissertation, which focused on the topic of the problem of novelty, a concept that was important in perceptual research. Using rats, Alice studied "reaction to novelty as a function of context," despite her thesis adviser Dick Walk's disbelief and doubt in her thesis topic.

Finally, in 1967, after four years of working on the study, she defended her disseration and earned her Ph.D."