Early Life and Education
Born on May 28, 1930 in Chicago, as a youth Drake loved electronics and chemistry. He reports that he considered the possibility of life existing on other planets as an 8-year-old, but never discussed the idea with his family or teachers due to the prevalent religious ideology.
He enrolled at Cornell University on a Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. Once there he began studying astronomy. His ideas about the possibility of extraterrestrial life were reinforced by a lecture from astrophysicist Otto Struve in 1951. After college, he served briefly as an electronics officer on the USS Albany. He then went on to graduate school at Harvard in radio astronomy.
Drake's hobbies include lapidary and orchid cultivation.
Read more about this topic: Frank Drake
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.”
—Gerald Early (b. 1952)
“Your success story is a bigger story than whatever you’re trying to say on stage.... Success makes life easier. It doesn’t make living easier.”
—Bruce Springsteen (b. 1949)
“If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)