@gallentjill Here is my perspective as someone with an M.D. and a Ph.D., who does research for a career.
- I'm not sure it's necessary or even beneficial for someone to get both degrees. A Ph.D. alone would have been sufficient for my area of research. The M.D. degree and associated clinical training in my case probably just took 6 years away from my research. This doesn't hold for everyone, of course, but two degrees are not necessarily better than one.
- Accomplishments or accolades in grade school, middle school, high school, and even college mean almost nothing later on in life. In research, no one cares or knows where you went to school or what awards you have received; they care instead about your results.
- Young students who work hard to pad their resume are often driven by extrinsic rewards, like grades or college admissions. But I find that successful researchers are driven instead by their intrinsic motivation, including their desire to understand a particular problem or to reconcile some discrepancy. People who are driven by extrinsic rewards, which can involve always trying to conform to a teacher's expectations, can have an attitude that goes against being nonconformist and creative.
- High school students who work in a lab and get their name on a paper generally don't have the understanding or insight that started the research question to begin with. They generally contributed a small part to the work, like running a gel or generating a figure. It is a much different task to be a principal investigator, who comes up with original ideas, and gets grant money or support to pursue those ideas.
- One does not need to be exceptional at math to be a scientist. One example of this is the great biologist E. O. Wilson at Harvard, who took algebra in his freshman year at the University of Alabama, and didn't take calculus until he was 32 years old.
- For science, it may not be the best idea to matriculate at the most selective school you are admitted to (i.e., being a small fish in a big pond). Malcolm Gladwell discusses this in his book David and Goliath, where he provides evidence that it is often more beneficial to be a big fish in a small pond. The Nobel laureate Thomas Cech wrote an article discussing how liberal arts colleges do well in educating successful scientists.
- Science is a highly social activity. A scientist needs to organize a team to help conduct the research, supervise and teach students, collaborate with other researchers, and communicate results to others. These people skills are often not apparent at the high school level.
- Success in science generally does not require "genius". It does require some reasonable level of education to learn the fundamentals of one's field. But beyond that, success depends mainly on personal qualities: curiosity, common sense, drive, and hard work, in addition to the social skills mentioned above. Sometimes, there is a bit of luck involved, though, such as being in the right place at the right time to make a particular observation.