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<p>No, you could also have banked on going to a lower-tier school that would have given you a full merit scholarship.</p>
<p>My take is this. EVERYBODY who is highly academically competent can get a full ride somewhere. If you are poor, you can get that full at a top private school via financial aid. If you are not poor, you can get a full ride at a lower level school. Of course if you are really really good, you can get a full merit ride from a top private school that gives them out (i.e. Caltech). </p>
<p>My point is simple that defeatism is the biggest problem you can face. The easiest way to fail at anything is to convince yourself that you can’t do it. </p>
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<p>I am not saying that the world “revolves” around what you do in high school. But the world does “revolve” around your education. I know other people who went to no-name low-tier schools, kicked butt there, then went to top-line graduate programs. </p>
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<p>Really bad, huh? And how bad is that? Have you seen your own family members beaten by advancing Communist soldiers? Do you still not know what happened to some members of your family? Were you then forced as a youth to come to a strange country where none of your family, including you, spoke any of the language, where you were forced to live in ghetto conditions filled with marauding gangbangers that hated you because they thought all Vietnamese people were Communists? Were you and your brother and sister forced to work in local jobs after school in conditions that would almost certainly violate child labor laws because you had to help your family pay the rent? </p>
<p>That’s a pretty fair description of the childhood that my Vietnamese friend experienced. He didn’t speak any English at all until he was about 10 or 11. Yet he ended up getting 2 degrees from Harvard. </p>
<p>The point is, you can succeed even if you start off in terrible conditions. You can do it. But the first thing you need is to believe you can do it. My friend always believed that he could succeed even though he and his family arrived in the US with literally nothing. </p>
<p>Self-defeatism is the most pernicious problem I see in society - the feeling of some people that they just can’t succeed, so they don’t even try.</p>