"I was beaten every single day from second through seventh grades, usually by multiple assailants.
I was the 'scholarship kid,' I was the 'brain,' and I was 12 to 18 months younger than the other kids (and therefore smaller and weaker)." Recess, for example, was unmitigated hell. While this provided a lot of opportunities that I wouldn't have had otherwise (advanced math and languages, for example), there were some less pleasant aspects. I started first grade at five, and got a scholarship to a rather exclusive private school starting in second grade. "One thing that nobody seems to have mentioned is negative reactions from one's fellow students. I look back on that in shame - not because it wasn’t true, but because that was a label others created for me that was severely harsh."Ģ5. My only superlative in high school? Female teacher’s pet.
Why? Because from that age on, I was labeled as a nerd. "I can’t tell you the number of times I wished, for even a second, that I hadn’t been placed in the gifted program at the age of 10 at my school. But since then, I have been told by multiple teachers and other people in my life who knew I was gifted that I 'wasted my gifted and talented-ness on an education major.' You are held to a standard no one can live up to." I immediately switched majors to education, which made me so much happier. I spent two days in an advanced Calculus class as a freshman in college and HATED EVERY MINUTE of it. "I went to college with a ton of pressure to 'use my intelligence and talents' (my dad pushed me to major in mathematics because I took five types in high school, including stats and AP Calculus). I was never again a 'genius' in school, but obviously I worked hard enough to get into school and study medicine, even as 'average.'”ġ7. I had agoraphobia, extreme anxiety, and eventually was diagnosed with ADHD.
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I didn’t know how to balance a job and laundry. I was embarrassed I would never be a physicist. I finished my associates at a community college, feeling like a true failure. We couldn’t go into dorm halls that weren’t ours, and we weren’t allowed to get less than a B. We weren’t allowed to have our cars, or leave the campus. I know other horrible stuff happened there I just don’t remember. I don’t remember my entire time there, or much of that summer. They told me if I didn’t take over the summer, I might be kicked out of the school. My second semester there, I got a D in Calculus 2.
I got a C on my first calculus exam, and the dean of the school came to my dorm to put me on academic probation. Well, turns out you need to know calculus for that. My plan was to go to grad school there, and become a theoretical physicist. "Before I started there, I had already toured Harvard and met with an adviser in their physics department. I had no clue how to study, or what to do if I didn’t immediately understand a concept."
Suddenly, sitting in class and doing my homework while the professor talked didn’t work. I got to this university, and I crashed and burned. By my second year of high school, I was in AP physics, calculus, biology, chemistry, English, and an ACT prep course. I didn’t take foreign language, music, gym, health, personal finance, art, and history. "I went to college at 16, a gifted program at a university, for kids like me.
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