After the banquet, the AEC representative explains to you that the AEC Special Award includes considerably more than the Certificate of Achievement you have just received. First, a duplicate certificate will be sent to your principal for display among the school trophies. Then, in August you and your science teacher will fly to Chicago for a week as exciting and rewarding as the one you have just completed. You will be guests of the AEC’s Argonne National Laboratory—an outstanding center for nuclear research. Your group will spend several days behind the scenes in Argonne’s laboratories. You will visit outstanding research facilities and science museums in downtown Chicago. Best of all, you will have an opportunity to discuss your interests and career plans with members of the Argonne staff—men and women who are doing professional research in the same areas that interest you. What are the costs of such an experience? Only the attention you pay to your science instruction; the thought and care you devote to a project related to nuclear science; and the clarity and ingenuity with which you explain that project to your classmates, teachers, and the general public through your science fair exhibit. [Illustration: _First Atomic Energy Commission Special Awards winners, selected at the 13th NSFI at Seattle, photographed during their Nuclear Research Orientation Week at the AEC’s Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago in August 1962. High point of the week, winners report, is the opportunity—pictured here—to talk face-to-face with Argonne scientists who are working in areas of research of particular interest to each student visitor._ Courtesy Argonne National Laboratory] [Illustration: continued] [Illustration: _1963 AEC Special Awards winners and their science teachers spent their Nuclear Research Orientation Week at Argonne National Laboratory. Top photograph is of Elizabeth Winstead of Jacksonville, Florida, whose prize-winning exhibit at Albuquerque is pictured on the cover. The photograph below hers is of William E. Murray, Jr., of Bethesda, Maryland, who was also an AEC Special Awards winner at Seattle in 1962._ Courtesy Argonne National Laboratory] QUO VADIS? Or “where do you go from here?” First, resolve now to enter science fair competition this year. You may not win, but at least you will have started, and you will gain some of the experience needed for victory in later years.