 In 1929, Pecora was awarded the Charles H. K. Halsey Scholarship that provided a $1,000 annual scholarship at Princeton University, where he majored in geology and geologic engineering; he was awarded a bachelor's degree in 1933.After graduation, he stayed on at Princeton as a geology tutor.In the summer of 1934, he was a field assistant to Erling Dorf, working in Montana on Paleozoic stratigraphy.