University School A Math Science Signature School: Fill & Download for Free

TL;DR: Secondary school was very rough for me.After the fourth grade, I moved to Hong Kong and went to a British school. The birthdate rules were different between the American and British schools. September 1st in the US and January 1st in the British schools in Hong Kong. British schools also start a year earlier. Consequently, due to by December birthdate, I got thrown 2 years ahead into secondary school (1st form equivalent to 7th grade rather than 5th grade). I survived a-okay and thrived there.When I came back to the US, my parents and I decided that should be in 7th grade rather than the 6th grade. However, because the British school didn't care about my US school records, they never took them. When I came back, my school records from K-4th were left with my previous class. Consequently I only had a year's worth of information from a foreign school. The US schools district I was in had a policy that "if you don't have a school file, it's because you wanted to lose your school file." I guess this is a common strategy for parents of problem children - "give the students a fresh a start in a school system." Of course my school district was wise to this strategy and put me into remedial math and English classes and into classes with kids with behavioral problems. Of course no one said anything and my file was sitting with my 6th grad classmates at an elementary school, where I had never once had discipline action (I was in the talented and gifted program and never had detention once).It took most of 7th grade to get this kabuki theater worked out. I was sitting with people who tortured animals for fun and idolized Nazis. The normal kids thought I was problem student and wouldn't talk to me.Unfortunately this first impressions last for a long time. I became disaffected as this went on for 6 years. I always did well in math and science, but I was kept out of honors classes (despite having the highest score by a mile in all my courses -- in Trig I had 105% average at the end of the year, the next person had 92% and the teacher wrote a negative recommendation to getting me into honors chemistry).I eventually said fuck this and in my senior year I just started to take college courses rather than high school courses. I managed to be in the square root club my last semester and because of this, they determined that I didn't have enough credits to graduate. It turns out that they tried to make up a rule that only one college course could count towards high school graduation. To this day, I don't know if this ever got resolved and I might not have a high school diploma.I never applied to college. I was sick of education. My mother filled out my college application to my local university where I had completed a full freshman year's worth of classes and it was only a 1-page form with one signature to re-enroll.I still dropped out of college before my first semester of proper college.After 6 months of trying to live on my own, I discovered that a college degree might have some value and went back for the spring. I graduated on time with all the courses for a PhD physics complete and went to Berkeley for my PhD.High school was terrible for me. I think worse than for most. But I survived.As for what I appeared like, I was not friendly or happy. My only friends were the people from the wrong side of the tracks. I had long hair for a lot of high school. I had no friends who were "good" boys and girls nor would they have had me as a friend.

On February 28, 2020, CEOWORLD Magazine ranked the world’s top 50 billionaires from “richest to poorest”. As we might expect, these megawealthy individuals belong to the high-IQ group. The table below (taken from my book on intelligence) displays the net worth and the educational backgrounds of the top 10 in the rich list–most of them having specialized in mathematics and computer science. Their IQs are estimated from their scholastic records, SAT scores, and the calibre of the universities at which they were accepted. Where SAT scores are unknown, the institution at which an applicant is accepted is a reasonably good indicator of his SAT score and, in turn, his IQ.For example, Bill Gates, with a reported IQ of 160 had a near perfect score of 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs and was accepted into Harvard where he studied law, mathematics, and computer science. Jeff Bezos, identified as “gifted” in elementary school, was accepted at Princeton and subsequently graduated summa cum laude in electrical engineering and computer science. Warren Buffet attended the Wharton School of Economics, where he studied for 2 years before transferring to the University of Nebraska from which he graduated at age 19. He subsequently earned a Master of Science degree in Economics at Columbia University. Bernard Arnault studied at the prestigious École Polytechnique de Paris where he received a BA in engineering. In 1985, he bought Christian Dior using $15 million from his father’s construction company and went on to build the luxury goods group LVMH that includes Louis Vuitton and Sephora.Amancio Ortega is the outlier in this stellar cast. His IQ is unknown because he dropped out of school at age 14 and worked his way to the top of the clothing industry, starting at the bottom as an assistant to a local shirtmaker. However, his chain of successes in the business world suggest that he has a high level of intelligence.Mark Zuckerberg, like Bezos was identified as gifted early in his career and won prizes in mathematics, physics, and astronomy while attending the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. While a student at Harvard University, he developed the Facebook software that would become his signature creation and make him a billionaire at age 23.Larry Page’s father was a computer science professor at Michigan State University where his mother taught computer programming. Following a stellar academic career that brought him to Stanford, Larry predictably pursued a Ph.D. in computer science. His thesis supervisor Terry Winograd suggested that he investigate how the articles on the World Wide Web were linked. Pursuing this suggestion, Page embarked on a project he called “BackRub” that would trace each page on the web back to its antecedents. This would eventually enable the identification of the seminal sources from which the other links emerged. Excited by the challenge of the BackRub project, fellow Ph.D. student Sergey Brin joined the project and the two massaged BackRub into what we know today as Google–a system for organizing the world’s information base that has been described as “the most empowering invention since Gutenberg’s printing press.”Like Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg was interested in the world of finance. He completed a Bachelor of Science in engineering at Johns Hopkins University and an MBA at Harvard Business School. This led to his founding of a business that provided Wall Street with highly sophisticated analyses of trends affecting various types of investments.Steve Ballmer, a Harvard classmate of Gates who studied applied mathematics and economics, had scored a perfect 800 on the math section of the SAT. Their emotionally-charged debates in the Harvard dorm during the small hours of the morning–exchanges that Gates called, “high bandwidth communication”–are legendary. In 1980, Ballmer left the MBA program at Stanford to join Microsoft Inc. as its first business manager, and became its CEO in 2000.This brief survey of the ten wealthiest people in the world reaffirms the old adage, “there is no substitute for brains.” All of these men, (except possibly Arnault who received money from his father’s business) were self-made billionaires with high or very high IQ. Brilliant inventions and technological breakthroughs that generate megawealth seldom, if ever, come from those of low or mediocre IQ. A close review of the next 490 top-ranked billionaires in the rich list reveals that those who have accumulated (rather than inherited) great wealth are overwhelmingly drawn from the ranks of those with so-called “book smarts,” even though the applications of their intelligence may appear to be very practical and removed from an academic context.While a high IQ is a valuable asset for those seeking great wealth, there are many Hi-Q people who never accumulate much wealth because they are not interested in acquiring money or because their passion is channeled into some academic or artistic pursuit. One example is Chris Langan, billed as “the smartest man in America,” with a measured IQ of 190. His story, along with those of other Hi-Q people who never aspired to wealth is told in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. In his book, Entrepreneurial Genius: The Power of Passion, Gene Landrum presents anecdotal information to support his assertion that passion, tenacity, and self-efficacy are as important as IQ in entrepreneurial success.

Whoa, so much negativity!I am your all-the-way Chinese gal. My parents sent me to the nearest preschool near our home when I was barely able to walk, because they were busy with their work and my grandparents were not available to babysit me then.I then went to the nearest elementary school near our home too after finishing my preschool education.Now, before saying that I later went to the nearest middle school near our home, I have to pause and tell you an episode when I transferred elementary school in the fifth grade and stayed there till graduation simply because we moved.And there you almost got it. I did not go to the nearest high school near our home, reason being that before high school, everyone was encouraged to attend the school in their neighborhood but in the last year of middle school, students took the so-called “high-school entrance examinations” and was admitted by the best one within their grades hopefully.So I did. The high school I eventually went to was best matched with my grades, but was super far away from our home. Very reluctantly, I became a boarding student and that lasted for three years.Again, upon finishing high school, I took “Gaokao” (college entrance examinations) and decided to go to the university that best matched my personality. And grades, of course.And near our home, of course.That was a pretty lengthy education background huh.I am not going to say that the school days were easy. They simply were not. Besides, it truly sucked being a child.Studying was tedious. Every answer that has been written under this question mentioned that.I second that. I had art teacher as my math teacher for a year. (Wrote about that in one of my answers: What makes Chinese math lessons so good?) I did a lot of drawing but failed bitterly in math.I cried a lot over my grades as a child and I cared deeply about my personal rankings in the exams. Unlike me, my parents were pretty laidback and they hated to see me cry over matters in studies, so much so that whenever I passed a “bad” grade to my mom and asked for her signature, the first thing she wanted to know was not “how come,” but “did you cry this time?”To put all those embarrassing tears aside, many a “first-time” happened when I was a student in China.I built my first “biology lab” with a glass tank, grass and tree leaves, snails, worms, soil, dragonflies, and more worms in second-grade science class. We were raising silk worms in the meanwhile for the big yearly project and the bonus was you got to keep all the silk worms.I carved my first wood painting and printed several copies for my friends with ink in art class. I also made mannequins made of radishes, built a stool with real wood, and learned to build the simplest robot in skills lab.I wrote my first Chinese play and English play in Chinese and English class, respectively. The play “Turandot” I directed got a second award in my high school drama festival.I was an exchange student in a Japanese high school for a semester. And I learned to work on a farm during the customary trip that seniors in my high school took together to a local farm and lived and worked there for a week.I was, and was not, a typical Chinese student among my peers.I did not have to go to “Youth Palace” for Sunday classes to learn to play musical instruments, paint, dance, sing, or calligraphy. Even though in hindsight, I would much rather have done some of that.I did not have much cramming class either. Thankful to my parents who did not believe they were worth the money.Instead, I spent tons of weekends and weekday evenings watching cartoons, reading, playing poker with my father, drawing, and almost anything that I felt like doing.But I was not so atypical.I was such a “teacher’s pet.” You’d see my homework being displayed on the blackboard almost every week with neat handwriting and perfect answers.I learnt to become very political with childish shrewdness. Joined the Children’s Band at 7, Youth League at 13, and the Party… not yet. I also gave speeches now and then whenever we had important visitors.I was really proud of my “typical side” when I was younger and living the student life. But as an adult, and looking back, I realized none of it matters save how I gradually came to being who I am today.I have turned out to be much of a disappointment, so to speak, considering the “glorious” history I had and the meager achievements I have made so far.Nonetheless, I have no regrets. I could not possibly be happier any other way.