221–223 of 223 posts
“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…
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We had a new teacher for maths in eighth grade. I remember how enthusiastic he was about set theory. He was so excited to talk about it and reminisced that the first time he saw set theory was in the second year of college. Granted our stuff was just introductory stuff but I doubt I'd care the slightest between AND and OR and associate them with intersection and union if it wasn't for the teachers. Now my professor i…
I was bored, not because of the teachers, but because I didn't have to do much work to comprehend the material. I never thought of telling anyone that I was working through the rest of the textbook just to keep myself occupied in class. I just kept my head down and did my best to un-bore myself. Which bit me in the rear end when I got to University and started taking classes that required studying.
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Yeah, there was a guy at my alma mater (Olin College of Engineering) who entered at 14 or 15. He was perfectly normal and well-adjusted. I mean, it was a weird cloistered tech school environment, so "normal" and "well-adjusted" are relative here, but I also didn't realize he was so young until he mentioned it. I mean, sure, you get the occasional Ted Kaczynski, but the vast majority of kids I've heard of entering col…
> you get the occasional Ted Kaczynski Occasional? Ted was one of a kind. And apparently, you don't "get" someone like him. Allegedly, rather, you "make" that kind of person through government sponsored psychological torture experiments. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-...
That's, unfortunately, who a lot of people automatically jump to when they think of "maladjusted precocious children/young adults" I think there was a RadioLab episode about him as well?