Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, you can look at it this way, he would have never been well-served by the traditional society-determined path anyway. A project like this has the tendency to just blow away all other considerations. If you were hiring for a physics position, would you take the guy who got straight A's on his physics coursework, or the guy who built an effing nuclear reactor in his bedroom?
The sad thing is that if you were faculty, looking for a graduate student to supervise, you'd probably pick the one with straight A's and no hobbies, because you could get them to do whatever you wanted, without risk of them getting their own ideas or leaving.
That's probably not true. I have run into very few faculty who want to have robots working for them, and I know quite a few faculty who are suspicious of perfect transcripts from potential grad students because it often means they avoided difficult courses or outside projects.