hatham College, in Pittsburgh. Here she fell under the influence of Mary Scott Skinker, whose freshman biology course altered her career plans. In the middle of her junior year, Carson switched her major from English to zoology, and in 1928 she graduated magnum cum laude."Biology has given me something to write about," she wrote to a friend, as quoted in Carnegie magazine. "I will try in my writing to make animals in the woods or waters, where they live, as alive to others as they are to me." With Skinker's help, Carson obtained first a summer fellowship at the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole in Massachusetts and then a one-year scholarship from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. While at Woods Hole over the summer, she saw the ocean for the first time and encountered her first exotic sea creatures, including sea anemones and sea urchins. At Johns Hopkins, she studied zoology and genetics. Graduate school did not proceed smoothly; she encountered financial problems and experimental difficulties but eventually managed to finish her highly detailed master's dissertation, "The Development of the Pronephoros during the Embryonic and Early Larval Life of the Catfish." In June 1932, she received her master's degree. Carson was entering the job market at the height of the Great Depression. Her parents sold their Pennsylvania home and moved to Maryland to ease some of her financial burdens. She taught zoology at Johns Hopkins during the summers and on a part-time basis at the University of Maryland during the regular school year. While she loved teaching, the meager salaries she earned were barely enough to sustain herself, and, in 1935, her financial situation became even more desperate when her father died unexpectedly, leaving her solely responsible for supporting her fragile mother. Before beginning her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins, Carson had arranged an interview with Elmer Higgins, who was head of the Division of Sci...
