<p>
And it hasn’t sunk in yet…</p>
<p>No employer wants an employee who won’t do the work.</p>
<p>David, when you apply to college, just make sure you start with schools that you know will take you and that you can afford. Despite what your parents have said, unless they have a huge nest egg or someone who will pay your college costs, they are not going to be able to cover what private colleges cost each year. It’s more than their take home pay. And that’s without the room and board thrown in there. So you want to run your family finances through some FAFSA estimators and see if you qualify for for the PELL and any state grants if your state gives out any. You also want to see what the EFC is that is generated. That gives you some idea what is expected of your family in terms of payment, though few colleges are going to honor it. </p>
<p>Once you have your bases covered that way, you can apply away with wild abandon and see if any schools will buy into your ideas and pay for you to go there. If they do, congratulations. If not, then you are another kid with many ideas and opinions that will have to stand in line and pay for what you get. Nothing particularly special. Work hard, do well and you can improve that lot, but it takes time and work, not particularly rewarding in itself unless it’s the sort of thing you like. That you have a high IQ says that you can pretty much be successful in any academic field IF you put in the work. The figure itself isn’t going to get you anything. No school or employer will give money on that basis alone, and likely won’t even ask for the number, so you might as well forget about it.</p>
<p>David,</p>
<p>I’m obviously not a parent; I’m just a year older than you. But this thread really stood out to me as I’m close to a few people - two kids and one adult - who seem to have your exact mindset, so I hope you don’t mind that I’m replying. (As a side note, I actually wrote my college essay on the adult. He’s a relative of mine, and his story always really affected me.)</p>
<p>I was wondering if you could clarify a couple things about your situation:
- What’s your high school like? Public, private, how many AP/IB classes offered?
- What were your study methods for the SAT/ACT?
- If you like learning so much, why didn’t you learn the material in your classes? I can see the motivation behind not doing certain busywork assignments and what not, but I don’t see why someone who loves learning wouldn’t strive for knowledge above and beyond what a course required…fill me in, something’s not adding up for me here.
- Is your school year over yet? If not, is there any hope for your grades this semester.</p>
<p>I won’t reiterate that you’ve been lazy, need an attitude adjustment, and aren’t especially exceptional (at least based on IQ and demonstrated talent). Enough people have said that already. I do respect the fact that you’re trying to change, if this is actually a genuine attempt.</p>
<p>Schools and companies, especially those that are the most desirable have set certain standard for who they take. If you don’t meet them, they are not interested in your reason. You just are not welcome. You have to find your own way to support yourself and get educated. Some people do just that. Some even do well in that pursuit, but most do not. </p>
<p>I am an older mom, and have known many who have done things their own way. Though I hear the stories of this person or that who has done so well being an outlier, those are the exception and the news. Most of those who did not do well in school, did not learn to work with society’s rules are a bunch of tired old folks who look older and more tired than the rest of us. That they were once so chipper, enthusiastic, filled with ideas,vim, and spirit is sad. Had they channeled it in other ways, things might be different for them.</p>
<p>cptofthehouse,
I was just thinking about the man who works the counter at the drycleaners…he is always talking about how he belongs to MENSA and that society just doesn’t understand/value him.</p>
<p>I would like the OP to avoid this fate.</p>
<p>Think science. Potential energy. Work. Do the equations. All of the potential in the world (which you only have an average college student’s worth) means nothing until translated into work. Since most others with college level abilities are willing to do the work there is no reason for colleges to consider someone (you) who does not. There is no room for merely above average slackers, and very little room for brilliant ones.</p>
<p>YOU HAVE A CHOICE. You either quit wasting time complaining and get to work or you face the consequences. Your future begins now. Change paths or get nowhere. Quit the garbage- lengthy posts that accomplish nothing. Do your homework instead.</p>
<p>Did you know that even highly educated/intelligent adults still need to do boring tasks? We get them done. You don’t. Open your mind and learn something. Enough from me and others.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I won’t go into this further, but no, an IQ score of 130 is not “average”…</p>
<p>David, even professors, academics, researchers, etc., do a considerable amount of mundane work. That’s why it’s called “work.”</p>
<p>Hey David,
Your position is a bit more common than you may know. A lot of bright kids (in the top 2 or 3% by IQ) are turned off to education in their pre-college years. They are smart enough to just skate along so they do. Then, the ugly reality hits. To do something interesting in terms of a career probably requires more education, typically at a college/university. To get into a good school, you need to demonstrate both talent and ability. A high IQ and a great essay won’t do it. You need study skills and will power - and schools need to see those , typically through test scores and grades and recommendations.
You have the fall semester to start to turn around. No matter what you do, you aren’t , at this point, going to get a full scholarship to Caltech or MIT. But you can start improving the skills you’ll need and , with some luck, do well enough that you will find a place at a school you can afford. Don’t turn up your nose at less well known schools either - you’ll find other kids who are smart there too.</p>
<p>I have been reading this thread and wondering if I should respond.</p>
<p>I have two sons. The first one said “I want to go to CalTech, my HS classes are not challenging at all, so let me find what I can do to challenge myself…”. He is now a freshman at CalTech, he went over and beyond.</p>
<p>The second one is very bright, feels that HS is waste of time (e.g. “What use is it for me to know who was the 22nd president of the USA?”). He has skirted by so far, but reality is just beginning to hit. There is a school he likes a lot for the area he is interested in, but it may be a stretch for him given his performance so far.</p>
<p>I can see a lot of my S2 in you. You can question authority, you can challenge the parents on CC who are giving you advice, you question why colleges pay attention to GPA and not to the fact that you were programming when you were 10 years old etc. etc. etc. till the cows come home. It will not get you anywhere as it is not getting my S2 anywhere.</p>
<p>There is a system, and most people follow the system. Yes, there are few people who have rebelled against the system and succeeded, and that is why we call them exceptions. Bill Gates was programming from a very young age but he got admission into Harvard. Michael Dell was developing his business from his dorm room in college. So they did get into college.</p>
<p>As a parent it is frustrating for me to see my son not working towards what his teachers, others around him and we see as his potential. But at the end of the day, we have come to the unfortunate realization that one needs to lie on the bed they make, else they need to find a way to get another bed.</p>
<p>I think the same applies to you. It appears you are very talented young man and you have some fairly lofty ambitions. There is a true and tried path to that (get good grades, go to a top school, then to a top Ph.D. program) and that is what most people are familiar with.</p>
<p>But that is not the only path, there are new paths (the road less traveled) and to travel those paths you often have to be a pathfinder. Unfortunately, if I knew what those paths were, it would really not be new. You have to find them for yourself and there are unique to each individual.</p>
<p>In your case, you have two types of choices. Get back to the well trodden path and it is not too late. You can still improve your grades get to a decent school and move on to the next step that will take you to your path.</p>
<p>The second type of choice is to do something new or innovative that will get you to where you want to be. It is not going to be easy, but such paths are out there.</p>
<p>That is why I tell my S2. “If you do not like a system, you find a way around it, but you need to do it on your own, dad cannot do it for you. Criticizing the system does not get you any where.”</p>
<p>For what is worth, that is my advice to you also.</p>
<p>Also, have you ever been tested for ADHD, Aspergers and other types of Learning Difficulties? The other thing that was difficult for us to comprehend was how a kid who is that bright can have learning difficulties or be turned off by school, but when he was diagnosed, a lot of things became very clear.</p>
<p>Mazewanderer, good post but I’m not sure it really applies to the OP. He just *thinks *he is that bright.</p>
<p>davidthefat - No matter how many times you start these threads, it never gets old. Cool story bro, and keep them coming.</p>
<p>Also, ignore the haters. You’ve got some fine essay material in your opening post, just fix it up a bit and use it everywhere. And you need more reach schools on your list; their admission rates are seriously low, so you need to build up your odds.</p>
<p>One more thing, since I’ve been thinking about this a little bit.</p>
<p>I think (that is, my own personal thoughts, just to emphasize) one of the most important things you can do at the moment is to try and change your perspective. I don’t know you, so I can only judge based on your posts. It’s hard to not get defensive when everyone is attacking you, and I understand this (having gone through it a lot with my own parents) and how frustrating it is. Of course, you know that you have to get your stuff together and obviously that’s the reasoning behind your posts. I think you should ask yourself a few questions, like why you care so much that everyone knows you’re smart or capable? In some ways, it’s not too hard of a question. Once you get there, then you ask, well how does making sure everyone knows I’m smart help me at all? I kind of realized eventually that it only helped to make me feel a bit more secure about the position I was in, having not accomplished much (or holding on to the few accomplishments I had). Of course feeling secure in a position where you have ~2.0 GPA is a really bad thing, so in the end it’s good that I felt insecure at the time since it drove me to try and NOT feel that way anymore.</p>
<p>You might ask different questions and get to it in a roundabout way, and you might superficially realize that you’ve got to change in this regard but it cannot possibly happen overnight. In fact, I still have problems with this. By the end of this past semester, I was only going to the twice a week meeting of only one math class (out of 6 classes total, only one was a non-physics or non-math class). So I still resent the fact that I have to sit through all these hours and listen to professors talk at me, and I still get the feeling that some of my professors are incompetent. This is generally a bad perspective to have, because it can lead to some seriously bad habits and can have serious consequences. The important thing is that I realized that not going to class didn’t affect my understanding of the subjects, but did affect my grades, or, at least, the amount of stress I was getting from worrying about grades. In my linear algebra and multi. calc. classes, I never attended any of the classes since day one. The latter was fine because I visited the professor once a week or so (in the end, she was okay with me not going to class, and in the end told me I was her best student), but the former I had no relationship with and nearly missed a test! After that, I realized that it didn’t matter how well I knew the material, because in the end college is not always about learning more (people like you and me can learn on our own very easily), but rather proving to everyone that we can. It gets to be about playing the game, and it can get severely annoying, but that’s the way it is.</p>
<p>Taking that point and going in a different direction, this is primarily why pure intelligence doesn’t always equal success. Of course there’s the motivation factor, but since everyone’s given you the straight advice about it already I won’t talk about that. What I’m thinking about here is in terms of ability, results, perspective, innovation, that sort of thing. In mathematics, especially pure math, there will always be [Terry</a> Tao’s](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Tao]Terry”>Terence Tao - Wikipedia) to completely destroy you, no matter how high your IQ (I use IQ as a tool of measurement, just because it’s easy) may be. It’s hard to translate harder work to results in mathematics because it’s just so different than anything else we know. In physics and computer science, this is much different. There are a bunch of different ways to view problems, and it doesn’t always take a genius to figure them out. In fact, sometimes it’s better to have a guy with a 135 IQ than a 180 IQ figure out some problem in physics. Why, exactly? Well, it depends on a lot of things, but just imagine a 180 that is the pure Nashian or Huntingesque combinatorist, and Mr. 135 is just a slightly above average, non-distinguished numerical simulations guy working at a university. Who exactly is better equipped to come up with the right fusion containment material, for example? A bunch of physicists in Japan or something recently got drunk near their experiment and poured red wine to observe superconducting properties. Turns out they made a groundbreaking discovery. What did this have to do with their IQ? Of course most people realize these sorts of chance situations, but not many think about experiences when they think of chance discoveries. What if 135 happened to stumble upon a materials science journal from some engineering school in Bombay lying around in a colleague’s office, and gets to reading it, later giving him some idea. Or maybe something completely irrelevant, like staring at tile patterns on the bathroom floor while taking a dump gets you a Nobel prize-winning idea. Or maybe something even more extreme, something that one couldn’t possibly even explain because the brain is an eerily mysterious thing. And say 180 is actually a physicist, because it doesn’t really matter. 180 might kill 135 in solving textbook physics problems because he may be able to hold on to more information at once (let’s say), but what happens in the research realm where you don’t know what information you should have? So what if 135 is Feynman and 180 is Pauli? Feynman was a totally weird and crazy thinker, but he was also insanely passionate and always wanted to do physics. So maybe someone else was actually smarter than him, but Feynman was <em>always</em> working on physics problems of almost any variety. You also remember that Feynman’s wife was dying while he was working at Los Alamos to build an atom bomb, so this may be obsessive behavior due to extreme stress about his wife. Who knows. Point is, the smartest people aren’t always the best scientists. And IQ’s are stupid.</p>
<p>Back to the original point of this post (before the huge digression about IQ’s and intelligence, since people are still talking about it). What you should really work on, I think, is trying to get away from this arrogant mentality. Confidence is good to have, but just remember that there are people who are phenomenally better than you at things you could only dream about. You should remember the important things, like why you want to become a professor in the first place, why you want to be an engineer or scientist, why you do any of this. At that point, it becomes obvious that putting in effort really is worth it, though it might be really difficult to see it in high school.</p>
<p>Anyway, I only mentioned this because everyone else seemed to notice that you’re being especially defensive. Of course, most here are parents so most will do the parent-like thing: scold you and try to show you reality. I think this isn’t going to work, because it never worked with me. This is the reason why I say you should think a lot more about the bigger questions regarding your life, because that’s how I figured it out for myself. It can only come from you, no one here is going to convince you of anything. But even after you figure it out, it won’t be a cake-walk to fix yourself. I still have trouble sometimes getting away from something interesting that I’m doing just to write some bogus essay or do more problems that I already know how to do. Of course, if you take a step back you can usually notice the flaws in these little arguments, so that’s what I try to do (take a step back and change my perspective, that is).</p>
<p>Anyway, sorry for the long-winded posts. I try to refrain from specific advice because if there were information that were applicable to everyone, you wouldn’t need me to tell you. I try to talk about things that I think about and my experiences (I feel like my experience might be relevant to yours), so you can take what you will from it. Hope it helps.</p>
<p>EDIT: Wow, I didn’t realize how much I wrote till I actually posted it. Sorry… >_></p>