Each year Stevens would provide three scholarships within the State of New Jersey, but the applicants had to pass a rigorous set of tests, for which Stover and Gaynor trained selected students.  As it was, Michael flunked the math portion of the test, scoring very high on the science and liberal arts areas.  What Michael didn't know was that he was so respected by his teachers that they secretly negotiated with the administrators at Stevens, agreeing that if Michael didn't make honors in his freshman year, Stevens could revoke his scholarship.

Gigliotti started classes at Stevens Institute of Technology in the fall of 1938.  "During my first week of school, a professor told me that I would eventually fail because my math exam scores were too weak and I wouldn't be interested in working extra hard to keep up with the assignments."�  However, Professor Hazeltine, in charge of the physics department, picked Michael and one other student for special projects instead of physics lab; Gigliotti's work on magneto striction, using steel and nickel bars, won him the Wendell Prize for Physics, presented during the 1939 graduation ceremony.  At the end of his freshman year, Michael kept the scholarship and went on to thrive at Stevens. 

In 1939, toward the end of Freshman year, with Joe Scavullo (1941) Gigliotti helped form the Catholic men's club at Stevens.  With representatives of Catholic students' clubs from nine other colleges, they met regularly at Corpus Christi Church on the campus of Columbia University, under Father Martin Ford, and eventually founded the Federation of Newman Clubs that became the nationwide Catholic campus ministry: The Newman Club, under the sponsorship of the Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of New York.  The twenty founding members, including Michael, were given the John Henry Cardinal Newman Honor Award from the Cardinal Archbishop of New York.