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Originally Posted by benjones
When I was on the road, kids asked me repeatedly whether or not they should take a given AP class.</p>
<p>"Well," I'd respond, "would you be taking it because you genuinely want to, or simply because you think it will get you into college?"
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<p>Except sometimes the choice is not so clear. I faced a similar situation as medicalmania back in junior year, when I was deciding between not taking AP Physics C and taking a bio class, or taking AP Physics C and taking two years of spanish (I had already taken 3 years of french). I chose the latter, and suffered for two years in a spanish class (and had a long sequences of B-'s in that class when I applied to MIT). I did however love Physics. I took it because I wanted to understand how the world works. But I also knew in my mind that taking the course would keep me competetive in my school. But I also ended up being the class dunce and joker in spanish. Seriously you would not imagine the kid sitting in the back corner who spends all class slowly tugging on the blinds to make them go up and down, drawing on the chalkboard slowly, and trading high fives with his friend next to him for the 68 = ALMOST PASS he just got on his last test would be going to MIT. :)</p>
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You're doing it for your <em>ranking</em>? (And only a slight drop in ranking, at that.) And not because this AP class is terrific, the best thing since sliced bread, and there's no way you could ever self-study the AP material in as excellent a way as taking this one class for which you have to drop band, which you've been participating in for years and won state awards for? Sigh....
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<p>Except the ranking does matter for many other schools, and possibly for scholarships. </p>
<p>What I am getting at is that there is a lot of merit in doing things that lie orthogonal to your "passions." There is merit in grinding through integrals and textbooks, in reading through thousands of pages of biology, in dull work. It builds character to sometimes put aside what you like to/want to do, and do what you have to do to get where you want to go. It's a type of delayed gratification. </p>
<p>My passion is trying to develop strong artificial intelligence. But that doesn't mean I'm following that. Instead I've recognized that I've got to force myself to read through thousands of pages of dense math and science texts, carefully. I have to wait a few years and take a couple courses before I can really get into the field of AI. Do I have fun reading through these dense textbooks in my spare time? Of course not (and I'm already in college, so don't give me the "trying to get into a good school" crap). If I wanted to have fun, I would go watch a movie, ride my bike or play video games.</p>
<p>Of course, this doesn't apply as harshly to this situation since it's band vs. AP Euro. But for many other situations, remember what JFK said: "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."</p>
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Now, for everyone who is nodding along at these nice words, please note that it's much easier to say and believe them after getting into the college of your choice.
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<p>And of course, Ben Golub is correct again. Damn Caltech.</p>