Schmidt went to Bartlett High School in Anchorage, and graduated in 1985. He has said that he wanted to be a meteorologist "since I was about five-years-old" but "... I did some work at the US National Weather Service up in Anchorage and didn't enjoy it very much. It was less scientific, not as exciting as I thought it would be - there was a lot of routine. But I guess I was just a little naive about what being a meteorologist meant." He decided to study astronomy just before he started at university. He was graduated BS(Physics), BS(Astronomy) from the University of Arizona in 1989. He received his MA (1992) and then PhD from Harvard University in 1993. Schmidt's PhD thesis was supervised by Robert Kirshner and used Type II Supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant.