The school corrected this error 45 years later when it awarded Pauling his high school diploma--after he had been awarded two Nobel Prizes.
In the fall of 1917 Pauling entered Oregon Agricultural College (OAC), now Oregon State University, in Corvallis. He was eager to pursue his study of chemical-engineering and signed up for a full load of classes. But finances soon presented a serious problem. His mother was unable to pay family bills at home and, as a result, Pauling regularly worked 40 or more hours a week in addition to studying and attending classes. By the end of his sophomore year, he could not afford to stay in school and decided to take a year off and help his mother by working in Portland. At the last minute, OAC offered him a job teaching quantitative analysis, a course he had completed as a student just a few months earlier. The $100-a-month job allowed him to return to OAC and continue his education.
During his junior and senior years, Pauling learned about the work of Gilbert Newton Lewis and Irving Langmuir on the electronic structure of atoms and the way atoms combine with each other to form molecules.
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