ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Saturday, February 15, 1997            TAG: 9702170010
SECTION: CURRENT                  PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
                                             TYPE: BEST AT TECH 
SOURCE: ANGIE WATTS STAFF WRITER

TOP STUDENT - JUNIOR IS HONORED BY THE COMPANY HE'S KEEPING

John Michael Schmidt is in awe.

It has been more than a month since this Virginia Tech junior was notified by the staff of USA Today that he had been selected from among 1,253 nominees as one 20 members of the All-USA College Academic First Team. And it has been nearly a week since the recognition was made public in a two-page color spread of the USA Today. But it still hasn't really sunk in.

It's not the award itself, not the new-found media attention he has received or the amount of the scholarship that has Schmidt so enthralled. It's the company he now keeps.

Among those selected to the team is a woman actively working on a treatment for colon cancer and a man who is working to disarm land mines in Bosnia. Those honored run the gamut from a 19-year-old sophomore to a woman who continued her pursuit of higher education in her mid-50s.

"The award came as a shock," Schmidt said. "It was even more of a shock when you see what everyone else has done. When I met with the other winners, I couldn't believe I was one of them. They've done so much more than me, it seems."

Perhaps he's just being modest.

Schmidt, 20, was recognized for a project he began his senior year of high school at Thomas Jefferson, a magnet school for science and technology in Northern Virginia, as part of an outreach program. It was then that Schmidt was linked to Lee Daniels, an associate professor of crop and soil environmental science at Tech, who is responsible for his nomination.

Schmidt's research is based on the thesis that with the right proportion of sawdust mixed into sewage sludge, the sewage could effectively be used as a fertilizer without contaminating the groundwater. Schmidt explained that too much sawdust is harmful, however, because it would take all the nitrogen out of the fertilizer and not allow for plant growth.

"He's the best student I've seen here in my career," said Davis, who joined the Tech faculty in 1982. "He's already won three or four major awards, including the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and the Morris K. Udall Scholarship, so when this one came up it was pretty obvious he had a good chance at it. They wanted not only a top student but also a student leader and we had one right here. It was one of those things that was a no-brainer."

Daniels accompanied Schmidt to the award ceremony in Washington, D.C., and was equally impressed with the other recipients.

"I was up there at the banquet with him, and all of the students were in awe of each other," Daniels said. "'I don't know why I was chosen,' I think that was a pretty common response."

Schmidt was chosen for his academic grade-point average. He was chosen for his research and contributions to the environmental science field. He was chosen for his leadership. And he was chosen for his involvement in the community.

"I heard all the 'I shouldn't be here' and the 'I didn't do that much' remarks from my son too," said Schmidt's mother, Jean. "He's very humble about his efforts. But he's a good student who's making a contribution to the community. Mike really does care about the environment. He was very surprised with the award, but I wasn't. He wants to make an impact on society and this is how he can do it."

There is no question Schmidt's concerns about the environment are genuine. He is a nature lover at heart, and enjoys sharing his knowledge about nature with others, particularly, he said, with children.

Schmidt and his high-school sweetheart Elizabeth Embree, a prevet junior at Tech who Schmidt said has been an instrumental part of his success, are part of a group of students who volunteer one Saturday each month at the Virginia Tech Museum of Natural History to teach fun and educational programs about nature to area youth.

If that isn't enough to convince you of his sincerity, his mother suggests checking out the back yard of his family's home in Herndon. Right in the center of suburban life, less than two miles from Washington Dulles International Airport, the Schmidt's back yard resembles a wildlife trail.

"I guess it started about six years ago," Jean Schmidt said. "Mike wanted to dig a pond in the back yard. Now we've got six. They're not huge, about the size of a bathtub and in them we have three different kinds of fish, water plants, water lilies, five kinds of lotus ... you name it. It seemed that every summer Mike wanted to dig another one. Now we have almost no grass in the back yard, but we have waterfalls connecting the ponds and streams ... it's beautiful."

Jean Schmidt said her son has even brought some of his lotus and water plants to Blacksburg, where they flourish in tubs outside the Hillcrest Dorm.

"If Mike has anything to say about it," Jean Schmidt said, "there's going to be a formal garden outside Hillcrest yet."

LENGTH: Medium:   90 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  ALAN KIM STAFF. J. Michael Schmidt learns the method for
          thin layer chromatography during a graduate-level soil microbiology 
          lab. color.