Radio Club of America Announces The Dr. Ted Rappaport Academic Scholarship

RCA (the Radio Club of America, the world’s most prestigious society of wireless professionals), is proud to announce the unveiling of the Dr. Ted Rappaport Honorary Academic Scholarship program. This scholarship is open to undergraduate and graduate students studying Electrical Engineering or an equivalent major who wish to make a lasting contribution in the field of next generation wireless technology. Application forms will be available on the RCA website beginning in the 2025 academic year. Applicants must demonstrate that they intend to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Rappaport and are planning to make a contribution researching advanced next-generation wireless technologies for the benefit of industry or medical science.

Recently RCA consolidated all of its named honorific scholarship funds into the The Captain Bill Finch Legacy Scholarship Fund in order to streamline financial management of the endowments and to return better value for our scholarship donors.  Traditionally RCA’s scholarship committee has granted scholarship funds directly to our served institutions which then select worthy candidates among their student bodies.  The New Century Fund was created as an alternative to allow students to apply directly to RCA for scholarship awards in order to help train the next generation of wireless professionals as RCA moves into its second century.  The charter of the New Century Fund serves as a mandate to help wireless industry students in high school, graduate school, vocational schools, and those attending international schools and universities. 

About the RCA Scholarship Committee

The Radio Club of America scholarship program was founded decades ago by inventor, wireless pioneer and RCA fellow Captain Bill Finch to fulfill the mandate set out by the RCA charter which states that the purpose of the organization is:

… to study and contribute to the development of radio communication programs and provide a scholarship fund for needy and worthy students for the study of radio communications.

Over the years, club members and/or their families have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to create named funds in honor of loved ones that help students committed to the development of their studies pursuing degrees in the related fields of wireless communications.  Scholarship funds are completely separate from the club’s general operating fund and only the interest/dividends from these funds are used for grants to RCA served institutions.  Donations are tax-deductible and an endowment of ten thousand dollars or more allows the donor to create a named scholarship fund and to choose the institution destined to receive committee scholarship grants.  Our goal is to encourage and help create the next generation of wireless innovators, engineers, broadcasters, and executives.

Recipients of RCA scholarship grants also receive a free 2-year student membership in the club.  Students from all over the country have benefited from our scholarship program.  Some of the schools whose students are currently receiving RCA scholarship committee grants include Capitol Technology University, Cooper Union University, Georgia Tech, Michigan Technological University, Montclair State University, North Dakota State, the State University of New York, Virginia Tech, and the University of Texas. 

About Dr. Ted Rappaport

Theodore (Ted) S. Rappaport, PhD is the David Lee/Ernst Weber Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and is a professor of computer science at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Dr. Rappaport is a pioneer in the fields of radio wave propagation for cellular and personal communications, wireless communication system simulation, analysis and design, and broadband wireless communications circuits and of site-specific radio frequency (RF) channel modeling and design for wireless network deployment–a technology now used routinely throughout the wireless industry. More recently, his work has explored the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands for future broadband access such as with 5G technology.

Dr. Rappaport has over 100 U.S. or international patents issued or pending and has authored, co-authored, and co-edited over 200 papers and 20 books in the wireless field, including Wireless Communications: Principles & Practice (translated into seven languages), Principles of Communication Systems Simulation with Wireless Applications, and Smart Antennas for Wireless Communications: IS-95 and Third Generation CDMA Applications.