Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

news.mit.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 223 posts

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#151

Post by efaref »

droithomme wrote: post #148
rtl49 wrote: post #22

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe I was at MIT. My life and my ambitions moved to another level at that moment.” I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person's success than it is a reflection of thi…

> had they been provided a similarly advantageous upbringing He's a minority immigrant that fled poverty and homeschooled himself. Please clarify in what ways this was an advantageous upbringing over say an american native raised in the suburbs by a wealthy family who attends the best public schools, few if any of whom enter MIT at 15.

Aside from homeschooling not being possible here - attending a proper school is mandatory, with even a single day of truancy punishable by strict fines for the parents - there is a curious advantage to being a position of having nothing to lose.

Whereas many working class families toil long hours and weekends at minimum wage jobs just to be able to pay the rent on their small house or apartment and so that they don't lose what little they have, those who have fallen upon hard times (particularly through misfortune, rather than their own laziness or fecklessness) have the opportunity of taking greater risks and investing more in themselves and in their future.

It leads to this weird kind of envy where poor natives look at wealthy second-generation immigrants whose parents fled poverty (often becoming the landlords of the poor natives) and wonder where the hell they went wrong.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#152

Post by balls187 »

lugus35 wrote: post #5
dagw wrote: post #2

It would be interested to check in with him at 35 to see where he ended up compared to other 'normal' 35 year old MIT grads. Basically does pushing your kid like that from such and early age lead to any significant long term advantages.

THIS IS YOUR EDUCATION, THIS IS YOUR SALARY ! $50K! ! ** ! ** * $40K! ** * Any Questions? ! ** * ! ***** * $30K! **** * ! **** * ! ***** * $20K! ***** * ! ***** * ! *** * $10K! *** * !** * ! * 0 +--------+----------+-----------+------------+---------+--*---------> no high some Bachelor's Master's Doctor high school college Degree Degree of school diploma Philosophy diploma http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/

For a long while, his site was a top google result when searching for photography tips.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#153

Post by Vraxx »

droithomme wrote: post #148
rtl49 wrote: post #22

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe I was at MIT. My life and my ambitions moved to another level at that moment.” I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person's success than it is a reflection of thi…

> had they been provided a similarly advantageous upbringing He's a minority immigrant that fled poverty and homeschooled himself. Please clarify in what ways this was an advantageous upbringing over say an american native raised in the suburbs by a wealthy family who attends the best public schools, few if any of whom enter MIT at 15.

Well, I think for one is the support of his parents. I don't think "advantages" necessarily have to be monetary ones. Certainly in this case his advantages included his parents and the opportunities that OCW provided. This is not to say that the kid did not work hard either as that is obviously false.

Consider a similar situation where a five year old wants to take college courses through an online program in an american native family that is wealthy, except instead his parents dismissed that idea on the sheer ridiculousness of a 5 year old taking online college courses. Or his mother not taking time from her already limited schedule to continue trying to find material for him to consume. This hypothetical child will be advantaged in other aspects of their life to be sure, but they probably won't be accepted to MIT at 15.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#154

Post by matheweis »

hemantv wrote: post #131
rtl49 wrote: post #22

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe I was at MIT. My life and my ambitions moved to another level at that moment.” I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person's success than it is a reflection of thi…

The grass always seems green on another side. There is a lot of benefit to the singularity of purpose at the same time there are a lot of side effects. To give you one example, homeschooled kid lacks good social skills, which are more important to success in life than mere intelligence or knowledge.

> homeschooled kid lacks good social skills...

Stereotypes like this are broad generalizations and generally not representative of the facts... sort of like saying that all Blacks are criminals, all Muslims are terrorists, or that Gays are child abusers - none of which are generally true.

Most of the homeschoolers I have known have excellent social skills, and further, even the few "creepy" homeschool kids that are really awkward socially tend to grow out of it completely within a couple of years of college.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#155

Post by cottonseed »

agentultra wrote: post #41
rtl49 wrote: post #22

“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe I was at MIT. My life and my ambitions moved to another level at that moment.” I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person's success than it is a reflection of thi…

> These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. We wish we had been but we didn't live in the right time or place for an upbringing like this. I remember stealing my dad's college textbooks on mechanics and applied mathematics and sneaking them off to school; taking out Byte and Compute issues from the library when they were available... just starving for more all the…

> I'm 33 now and I'd kill to be able to study mathematics full time and be a professor some day.

I started my PhD in math at 36. Admittedly, I made some life choices (savings, no kids or mortgage) that kept options like this open.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#156

Post by ultrafilter »

PaulHoule wrote: post #79

This seems to have been drawn from the same statistical distribution of many stories that center around this idea that "MIT students are smarter than students anywhere." The ideology of MIT is that you should go to MIT daycare, then MIT kindergarten and all the way through to the PhD and beyond, and if they had enough people in that pipeline they wouldn't bother taking applications from anywhere else. That idea is de…

In contrast (but not contradiction) with your experience, as an MIT undergraduate math major applying for PhD programs, my advisor warned me that the math dept. doesn't admit their own graduates. I applied anyway and indeed was not admitted (which was fine since I was admitted to UW-Madison, where I most wanted to go).

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#157

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #138

Children can do a lot more than they're given credit for. My 4-year-old demanded music lessons when his older brother was playing cello. He started on both cello and piano. Entering kindergarden, in music class the teacher had a keyboard, asked the children who could play. A little girl banged out chopsticks. Another little boy picked out twinkle,twinkle,little star. My son Andrew raised his hand, and played some Bee…

Fun fact: terrible handwriting is correlated with high dopamine levels in the brain, which is correlated with increased brain activity (~ intelligence).

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#158

Post by webXL »

cryoshon wrote: post #113
IshKebab wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It's a race to learn as much as you can before your brain loses plasticity. I certainly wish some of my teachers had spent more time teaching the people that cared and less time helping the D students that didn't. It definitely resulted in a few wasted years of education for me.

Your brain doesn't lose plasticity until you're dead. Ever hear of someone remembering a conversation they had at age 70? The neurons had to form new synapses (plasticity) for that to happen.

In my experience recall takes longer with age, and that's only if it's memorized in the first place. I think anyone over 35 can relate to this.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#159

Post by agentultra »

cottonseed wrote: post #155
agentultra wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. We wish we had been but we didn't live in the right time or place for an upbringing like this. I remember stealing my dad's college textbooks on mechanics and applied mathematics and sneaking them off to school; taking out Byte and Compute issues from the library when they were available... just starving for more all the…

> I'm 33 now and I'd kill to be able to study mathematics full time and be a professor some day. I started my PhD in math at 36. Admittedly, I made some life choices (savings, no kids or mortgage) that kept options like this open.

Good for you! I hope you are/have enjoying/enjoyed it. I made some different choices (savings, but kids and mortgage). It'd be awesome to start a PhD but completely irresponsible of me as I'm the sole income provider for our family at present.

For now I content myself with following my fancies and working on digestible problems in my spare time (devoured ONAG a couple of years ago, graphs, sets, concrete mathematics... found Martin Gardner and enjoying devouring his recreational maths books). When I get the chance in my work I tend to enjoy the maths more than the programming... distributed systems, computer graphics, compilers. But most commercial programming is book keeping.

C'est la vie.

Re: Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

#160

Post by stuxnet79 »

allendoerfer wrote: post #68
codingdave wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure it matters how broad his education was, if (as you said) he has been happy with his life, but also as long as he is adaptable enough to switch directions if he becomes unhappy with his direction later in life. Many of us old folk change direction over the years. The key to a happy life in the long run is not to know everything when you are young, or to have picked the right direction from the start,…

I think a basic understanding of history, culture and how our society works is absolutely required. I think it is our responsibility to prevent at least the worst mistakes we did in the past and preserve at least the best achievements. We have turned in circles in the past and will do it again if we do not get that we turned in circles.

Not a truism for everyone. The history, culture, and society I learned in school was too Eurocentric / Western and was completely irrelevant to my personal development and sense of identity as a minority in this society.
Post reply on HN