After finishing military school in 1951, Pierce worked briefly in an oil field as a roustabout. He was injured when a four-inch (10 cm) pipe fell on his hand, and he spent the rest of that summer working as a shoe salesman. Pierce earned a scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston. He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in physics. He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before attending graduate school, initially at Caltech during 1955–56. At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, he earned a master's degree and a doctorate in 1962. He taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.