<p>I am pretty sure that there were more illegal drugs in lockers at our law school than anywhere else on campus.</p>
<p>oops - forgot that one member of our class is a drummer for a pretty well known rock band and they still tour so he and the nun are probably tied for coolness. Maybe the female and male winners of the “most cool 40 years later” category. He just seemed pretty shy in HS. </p>
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<p>Wow. “Everyone” was doing it? When I was in middle school, one girl ran away from home for a couple of weeks with her boyfriend. It was assumed that they had sex, and this was a BIG DEAL. Very shocking at that age. I never knew anyone else who admitted to having sex or drinking at that age. Likely there were some, but certainly not even close to “everyone.” By high school, definitely, people became sexually active, and the drug of choice was largely alcohol. </p>
<p>The cool guy at my high school was the star athlete, who happened to be a good student too. I remember him as a very humble person. He went on to be a dentist.
Our female student body president became a CPA.
The nerdy girl went to the same college as I and continued to excel academically. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was the recipient of the university’s top graduation medal.</p>
<p>From the last couple of reunions I went to (been a while), I didn’t see any real shockers in what happened to people. Some of the kids we used to consider “derelicts” (the kids who smoked, did drugs, etc) ended up in real trouble, most of them ended up doing okay, while few of them went on to white collar jobs most of them ended up with their own businesses or doing skilled trades. Among the ‘geek set’, many did well, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and so forth. Interestingly, the jocks didn’t do particularly well, they did okay, but in my class a lot of them seemed to burn out in life, one kid who was very much the athlete was always very driven, and he ended up working for IBM and from what I know, ended up having a nervous breakdown. And yeah, there were the girls who matured fast, who thought they were all that, some of them turned their lives around and last I saw them, were nice people, others never got out of that “I am so gorgeous mode” and quite honestly, seem to have gone nowhere, some of them have been married multiple times, others had families but didn’t seem all that happy, either. </p>
<p>I think you have to be careful about studies like this, in part because every school is different. A high school in a rural area is going to be different than a school in an inner city; my high school, from a town that was mostly middle to upper middle class (today more upper middle) is going to be different than the high school in “Friday Night Lights” (in my school, sports were not revered particularly, and jocks had their own circle of admirers but it wasn’t that large, either), so studies like this aren’t going to give an effective picture, because what happens to the ‘cool kids’ really depends on who they are, and where they are…</p>
<p>For one poster, who was surprised the number of kids who became MD’s who weren’t necessarily the ‘top of the class’…I can answer that one I think, based on personal experience. A lot of the kids who were the top students back in our day, were often really bright, and probably didn’t have to work as hard to get those grades. The problem is that if you want to go into medicine, part of the prerequisite is to have the fortitude to tough it out, and to have the kind of background where working at stuff is the only way to get through. The kids who weren’t necessarily the ‘top students’ probably had to work hard to achieve grades, it didn’t come as easy, so they were used to doing the work, grinding through things, and that is what getting into Med school is like (I am not saying you don’t need to be intelligent, and I am certainly not demeaning what it takes to become a doctor, far from it). Course like Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry are not all that intuitive to most people, and you need to do the work, same is true with other areas, and the kids who had to work at it through high school had what it took to do it. I ran into a friend, years ago, when my dad was in the local hospital with heart problems. He was in med school then, I think 3rd or 4th year, and we talked about when we were in school, and he said when we did homework together and such he was always envious that in some ways it came easily to me…and I told him that in many ways he was lucky he had to work it through, because it led him to doing what he was doing, that the ‘come easy’ later screwed me up…there actually are studies about this, and I have heard it referred to as the “Avis” syndrome, that it often is better to be ‘#2’ and trying harder than to be #1, and organizational behavior studies have shown that in many cases, the kids who weren’t the 4.0 hyperachievers do better than the kids who were, in part because they never assume they are ‘the best’ as kids with the 4.0’s often are told, it is also why sometimes kids from a top college, like the Ivy League, may run into trouble in the real world, because they have been told they are the best and don’t quite understand they need to show that every day, which the kid from the state school might feel he/she has to show:)</p>
<p>I disagree with the whole premise of this article. I think the Ferris Beullers of the world do quite well. Remember, he wasn’t just “cool” and a rule breaker, he had the ability to cross all lines in the high school hierarchy. He was well liked by all the different cliques, as well as many of the faculty/staff, not an easy feat. People like that, who are able to generate respect and friendly relations with all types of people, seem to be able to manage very very well, particularly if they are in sales or another profession where “likability” and ability to generate good will are essential. He wasn’t a total derelict at all.</p>
<p>Two of the cool kids in my grade went on to play pro baseball. One of them climbed out of the window during history class. For some reason, the substitute asked ME if I knew where he went. I said, “He climbed out the window,” and I got harassed for weeks by the cool kids. I thought to myself, “Well, he’ll end up pumping gas while I make a lot of money.” Ha! He ended up making millions of dollars. The other kid pitched for the Red Sox and screwed up during the 1986 World Series. </p>
<p>Drew Brees also graduated from my high school, many years after me, of course. I wonder if he was a cool kid!</p>
<p>My high school was also bigger than my college. I knew some cool kids, and some popular kids; one who went to the same parochial school with me from k-8, and was our HS class president. That kid had charisma, and I’m going to try and find him. </p>
<p>We had no senior prom (“race relations”), I never went to a reunion (didn’t technically graduate, so…) and the school was shut down for being persistantly incorrigable. </p>
<p>His gf in K-6 wore a special shoe, but you would not have noticed. She had charisma too. </p>
<p>Didn’t think about it until I was in med school. I’m thinking classmates didn’t peg me for becoming a doctor, since we were “tracked” back then. Thanks to my mom, I think I was the only one taking AP AND vocational classes. Neighborhood kids didn’t think med school either, but that was sadder, at least in retrospect. One said “nobody get’s to be a doctor.” 
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