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My dad was brilliant, and was good across the board in every subject. I remember he told me that he'd gotten 100% on the French Regent's test in NY State. That's a reason that I switched out of h.s. French: I figured I'd never be as good as Dad. He was a dentist, graduating first in his dental school class, and getting a commendation on his score on the NY State dental boards. When I was young, I wanted to be a doctor, but switched out of that because I figured I wouldn't do as well in the courses as Dad had done in dental school.
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Sounds a lot like my father. Who was not only the valedictorian of his high school class, and admitted to Yale at a time when they had a strict quota limiting the numbers of Jewish students they took, but also, out of approximately 100,000 high school seniors in New York State, had the second highest score in the entire State in the statewide, all-subjects Regents exam they had back then. (They still had that exam when I was in high school, but I believe it no longer exists.)
And I remember knowing this from the time I was a little kid; my father still had the newspaper clipping from the New York Times. Of course, I also knew all about his straight A's (because he had saved all his report cards!), as well as about the fact that after he graduated from Yale he went on to Columbia Law School, where he was a brilliant student and on law review. Occasionally, when I was a young lawyer, I would run into people who'd gone to law school with him who remembered how brilliant he was and told me all about it. And, of course, he ended up as a partner in tax law at one of the larger New York City firms.
I never felt I could live up to his achievements, or my mother's either for that matter. (Graduating from Columbia Law School the same year as my father, as one of only three women in her class -- five years after arriving as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and after zipping through Sarah Lawrence, where she was admitted as a scholarship student, in about two years.)
No matter how well I did academically in high school, or thereafter, I couldn't live up to his achievements. (Even though I actually did better than he did in college.) But I certainly wasn't on law review at Harvard. And I know I deliberately stayed away from tax law as a field, because I felt I couldn't possibly live up to his standards. And, unlike him, I've never been a partner at any firm, let alone one of the big ones. When I think about all of it, he still makes me feel like something of a failure by comparison!
I really don't get the feeling, though, that my son has felt intimidated by my own achievements, such as they are. He certainly hasn't seemed to, although he has enjoyed comparing his SAT scores to mine, and seemed happy that combined, they were identical to mine (not counting the writing section, which didn't exist, of course, when I was in high school), that he did as well on AP's and subject tests, that he got into as many good colleges as I did, etc., etc. So, competitive, perhaps (which is fine; I'm kind of amused by it), but not, I think, intimidated.
Donna