Florida State University

The largest of the sixteen colleges at Florida State University, the College of Arts and Sciences contains the majors of nine thousand students and... is made up of nineteen departments, ten special programs, seventeen institutes. Nearly two thousand degrees are issued to graduates each academic year. The College encompasses the fields of social sciences, liberal arts, mathematics, sciences and interdisciplinary studies. Several academic programs enjoy national reputations. These include the Department of English, which boasts one of the nation's top creative writing programs; the Classics Department, which offers comprehensive programs ranging from analysis of Roman literature to archeology; and several other programs, including the Departments of Geology and Oceanography. The College of Arts and Sciences is the oldest college at the university having existed since the founding of the Florida Female College. Though it awarded bachelor's degrees since the founding, the first masters degree was not offered until 1908. The next year the university was renamed to the Florida State College for Women and issued the first masters degree under that name in 1909.
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The Florida State University College of Motion Picture Arts , located in Tallahassee, Florida, is one of fifteen colleges comprising the Florida... State University . The College was founded in 1989. With its very selective admittance, only 20-30 undergraduates and 30 graduates are accepted for each class. The film school offers a BFA and MFA. The Film School is regarded as one of the most accomplished film schools in the world and is well-known for selectivity in admissions. FSU Film students won more Student Oscars and College Television Awards in one year than any other film school. The college is one of the few film schools in the country to be recognized by the Directors Guild of America for "its distinguished contribution to American culture through the world of film and television". It is also the only film school in the nation to pay for all undergraduate and graduate students production costs, creating an environment in which students can concentrate on the artistry of film.
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Scott Alan Stapp is an American musician and singer-songwriter best known as the lead vocalist and lyricist of the rock band Creed, of which he is a... founding member. His debut solo album, The Great Divide, was released in 2005. A second album, Between Lust and Love, is currently in production. In addition to his career as a musician, Stapp had a brief stint as an actor, appearing in the film 30 Days Until I'm Famous, and more recently as an author, currently at work on a book tentatively titled My Confession. He has also been involved in various philanthropic activities. Despite controversy and criticism, Stapp has won numerous awards and accolades, including a Grammy Award for Creed's song "With Arms Wide Open" and numerous RIAA certifications. In 2006, Hit Parader ranked Stapp as the 68th greatest heavy metal vocalist of all time. Stapp was born as Anthony Scott Flippen on August 8, 1973 in Goldsboro, North Carolina, to his mother Lynda, a school teacher and his biological father, about whom little is known. He was adopted by Steven Stapp, a dentist who married Scott's mother, and decided to take his stepfather's last name.
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Robin Swicord is an American screenwriter and film director. She wrote the screenplay for the film Memoirs of a Geisha, based on the novel of the... same name by Arthur Golden. Her other screenplay credits include Little Women, Practical Magic, Matilda, The Perez Family, and Shag. Her directorial debut was with the 1993 short film The Red Coat, for which she also wrote the screenplay. Swicord wrote the screenplay for Karen Joy Fowler's 2004 novel The Jane Austen Book Club and directed the film, which was released in the United States on September 21, 2007. She also collaborated with Eric Roth on the screen adaptation of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on the short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Swicord was born in Columbia, South Carolina. She is married to screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, son of director Elia Kazan. Their daughter is actress Zoe Kazan. Swicord was featured in The Dialogue interview series. In this 90 minute interview with journalist Jay A. Fernandez, Swicord delves into the adaptations, collaborations and frustrations she's experienced as a screenwriter.
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John Robert Schrieffer is an American physicist and, with John Bardeen and Leon N Cooper, recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for... developing the BCS theory, the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity. Schrieffer was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and his family moved in 1940 to Manhasset, New York, and then in 1947 to Eustis, Florida, where his father a former pharmaceutical salesman began a career in the citrus industry. In his Florida days, Schrieffer enjoyed playing with homemade rockets and ham radio, a hobby that sparked an interest in electrical engineering. After graduating from Eustis High School in 1949, Schrieffer was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where for two years he majored in electrical engineering before switching to physics in his junior year. He completed a bachelor's thesis on multiplets in heavy atoms under the direction of John C. Slater in 1953. Pursuing an interest in solid-state physics, Schrieffer began graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was hired immediately as a research assistant to John Bardeen.
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Sir Harold Walter Kroto, FRS , is a British chemist and one of the three recipients to share the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and... Richard Smalley. He is the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at the Florida State University, which he joined in 2004; prior to that he spent a large part of his career at the University of Sussex, where he holds an emeritus professorship. Kroto was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, to Edith and Heinz Krotoschiner, with his name being of Silesian origin. His father's family came from Bojanowo, Poland, and his mother's from Berlin, Germany. Both his parents were born in Berlin but came to Great Britain in the 1930s as refugees from the Nazis because his father was Jewish. He was raised in Bolton, Lancashire, England, and attended Bolton School, where he was a contemporary of the highly acclaimed actor Ian McKellen. In 1955, the family name was shortened to Kroto. As a child, he became fascinated by a Meccano set. Kroto credits Meccano — amongst other things — with developing skills useful in scientific research.
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Robert Olen Butler is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for... fiction in 1993. Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, to Robert Olen Butler Sr., an actor and theater professor who became the chairman of the theater department of Saint Louis University, and his wife, the former Lucille Frances Hall, an executive secretary. Butler attended Northwestern University as a theater major and switched to playwriting at the University of Iowa . Butler served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971, first as a counter-intelligence special agent for the Army and later as a translator. He rose to the rank of sergeant in the Army Military Intelligence Corps. His experiences during that period have informed his writings, and as a result, in 1987 Butler received the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for outstanding contributions to American culture by a veteran.
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Michael Shaara was an American writer of science fiction, sports fiction, and historical fiction. He was born to Italian immigrant parents in... Jersey City, New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers University in 1951, and served as a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne division prior to the Korean War. Before Shaara began selling science fiction stories to fiction magazines in the 1950s, he was an amateur boxer and police officer. He later taught literature at Florida State University while continuing to write fiction. The stress of this and his smoking caused him to have a heart attack at the early age of 36; from which he fully recovered. His novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. Shaara died of another heart attack in 1988. Shaara's son, Jeffrey Shaara, is also a popular writer of historical fiction; most notably sequels to his father's best-known novel. His most famous is the prequel to The Killer Angels, Gods and Generals.
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