Advice for son who does not care about grades

collegealum314
Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:38:04 +0000

We are worried that he will be labeled as “smart but lazy”. He is hardly lazy as he will spend hours studying/ruminating on math problems. He has proven that he has talent in math…perfect scores on American Math Competition, Top 10 rankings in various national competitions and participated in Math Olympiad Summer Program. Is that enough for MIT to overlook his less than stellar grades (especially in English and Social Studies).



If he made MOSP, your son probably is right that elite colleges will ignore his grades in english and social studies. (This assumes that only the top 50-60 make MOSP. If it is more than that, like 150, then grades may matter more.)

I’ve always felt that english helps you develop as a thinker. For example, bridging two seemingly unrelated fields is a very verbal ability. Or asking yourself what seems missing in a theory, or using analogies marrying scientific concepts and non-scientific scenarios in order to develop a new theory. Assessing the broader significance of one’s work and looking for a new way of looking at a problem are also english/verbal exercises. And these are skills which are vital to developing a research program, to solve the big problems. If you’ve read about Oppenheimer, you know that he was a very verbal guy. I think this helped him be an outstanding theoretical physicist. The guy who invented string theory was a journalism major, indicative of some kind of english bent.

Personally, I knew a mathematician who was very verbal and artistic. When he was high school, he won ARML but didn’t win the big math competitions. Certainly he didn’t get close to MOSP. Anyway, his roommate at Harvard crushed all these competitions. However, the guy less talented at the math contests was the one who ended up solving an important 100-yr old problem in grad school and getting a faculty position at Harvard, while his former genius roommate couldn’t get a faculty position despite the fact that math competitions were so effortless. It is my theory that it was the verbal ability that set my friend apart and enabled him to solve that 100-year-old problem.

I don’t want to discount these math competitions, because certainly they are more than computational exercises. However, I do think that the guys who are good at english tend to have more staying power in academia.

So while I think your son will probably get into at least several top 5 schools (if not all of them), maybe he can be motivated to apply himself in english class if he thinks it may help him in a mathematics or technical career down-the-line.