Fern wrote:
How I was in school varies depending on who you ask. I think it was maybe third or fourth grade when I started getting B's, 5th or 6th grade when I started getting C's, and 8th grade when I got my first D on a report card. I have two older sisters who got straight A's and are neurotypical, so my mom always worried for me when anything I did even slightly deviated from her high and specific expectations... which she had to just get-over at some point, because I could just flat-out never deliver on those things. When I told her that I wanted to be a scientist at age 12, she laughed at me and told me that I wasn't smart enough.
Now I'm going to be receiving my PhD this year (fingers crossed).
I'd tell you that there was some point where I changed my behavior, learned how to learn, etc. but it would be a lie. I'm just doing the same thing. The truth is, in American society, we punish in children the same things we reward in adults. As kids we are told we need to meet these "benchmarks," or it's concerning if we have a different course of "development" than the other kids. It seems to me that kids are supposed to blend-in and disappear. As adults in the workforce, we're told that employers are looking for that someone unique, different, with creativity, who "thinks outside of the box." It's the total opposite of what we tell kids to be in school!
The irony makes me laugh pretty hard sometimes. I'm happily writing my thesis and trying to decide between different labs for my post-doc fellowship, while many of my former classmates who called me stupid in middle school are working dead-end jobs and I'd wager, can't remember half of the information I can recall from primary and secondary school courses I have taken.
So yes, as a kid I was in every sense of the word "behind" but my perseverance in academia, I think, has led me to end up ultimately ahead of most people in terms of school.
PhD in what?
PhDs can be a nightmare. You have to come up with your own thesis and it has to be valid. I've heard horror stories about people who were writing a thesis for their PhD and it was disproved or already discovered, imagine being in their metaphorical shoes, it would suck.
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"God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with prime numbers."
-Paul Erdos
"There are two types of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from looking at your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files."
-Bruce Schneider
18 Aug 2015, 4:21 am
