Feynman didn’t really work all the exercises in the book. He went back to the basic scientific and mathematical principals and built/derived them from scratch. He didn’t take other people’s conclusions for granted, he built them from the ground up.
OP,
Daughter #1 believed that a HS friend and intellectual competitor/colleague never studied, rarely practiced, occasionally crammed. He was just naturally gifted in all things. She thought I was mean to make bedtime at approximately 10; how could she compare with such genius, let alone maintain a GPA that would get her into a competitive college? I told her she needed her sleep, and I explained it just wasn’t possible for him to accomplish so much without work (two instruments, 20 clubs, a zillion APs, etc). I suggested that the friend didn’t realize how much he worked. She protested I couldn’t know.
Then one school night, after chess club or math league or ??, there was a major snow storm, and she went home with the prodigy as the roads from our house were impassible. Guess what? He went home to work, work, work, practicing instruments til after midnight. She realized that she was doing just fine in a relatively relaxed home. She had time for exploration and creation. She did just fine in the college lottery (now at HYPS), but even better, she learned to trust herself (and her mum).
I don’t know too many professions where you are “totally in or totally out” There are part time doctors and part time lawyers. Sometimes it takes you three years to get your Phd and sometimes it takes you nine. I find it really hard to believe that a .3 could derail any ones lifetime dream. Certainly no one I have ever met. My kid in college takes the classes they find the most challenging and interesting to them and that leads to the most personal development. They don’t always get A’s but learning is at the top of their list. I think they are far better off for their approach
I didn’t know who Feynman was when I was in college (just coming to the US), but my approach was similar. I did it that way to overcome a weak point: I was terrible at memorizing formulas. It might take me longer to arrive at the solution (compared to other people in the same class); but I knew I would ultimately get to the solution, and I would understand the problem better.
It can if one’s lifetime dream is to be a medical doctor and one’s undergrad cumulative GPA drops below 3.5-3.6. I’ve been within earshot of pre-med friends’ pre-med advisors who said if their GPAs fell below that to effectively “forget med school” because their chances of admission at that point would be effectively nil unless they want to take a substantial risk* of attending med school in the Caribbean.
- Greater expense and far lower chances of getting any medical internship/residency...much less a desirable one as the first priority for medical internships/residency goes to graduates from AMA accredited med schools in the US.
One cannot officially do a PhD part-time, especially at a respectable/elite academic department as in practice, most departments/advisors expect PhD students to spend practically every waking moment on relevant coursework, TA/Research Assistant work, preparing for oral/written comp exams, and performing/completing research and writeup of one’s dissertation.
One friend who has been a math Prof at a small SE LAC for 20+ years now recounted when we were taking summer classes at H* that his last 4.5 years in Princeton’s math PhD program** was filled with a sense of dread as despite getting some outside grants, he still needed to work secretly as a busboy at a nearby country club to support himself. If word got back to his department, they had a strict policy of permanently kicking the PhD student in question out for violating their rule against working during their time in the PhD program.
- He was taking them for personal enrichment/fun.
** Princeton has a well-known strict 5 year limit on fully funding PhD students in most departments. Some like the math Prof’s department would allow students to continue past 5 years but discontinue funding in the vast majority of cases whereas other departments like the one a college’ classmate’s father was in would summarily kick them out altogether for not finishing in 5 which forced him to finish his PhD elsewhere.
Gee- I never heard of the gifted kids or near gifted kids discussing or even thinking about grades. You just do things. Son was intense about cross country, active in orchestra plus academic EC’s but grades are private. Learning is just part of life, nothing competitive. I remember discussing totally nonacademic things into the night with my honors program friends in college. We could be intense/passionate about things- but I never heard of grades being the focus anytime, anywhere.
I totally agree with NOT being “totally in or totally out”. Most people smart enough to do time intensive schooling such as grad programs or medicine have other passions. You’d be surprised at the time spent not studying! Talk to physicians and you will find most with other interests and/or who sometimes want to change fields. With the high investment in time and money most can’t afford to quit, however. A grade is certainly only one point in time. A gpa, however, is an accumulation of many points in time. One lousy grade here and there will not undermine a future. For those with perfect grades all of the time I wonder about their ability to do consider taking risks or trying things challenging for them. There is a reason schools at all levels do not go purely on gpa for admissions.
Parents- it is easy for us to draw conclusions from our kids. However, we never have the whole story and only have or set of one to use as data. We overlay our interpretations on comments and observations. For different parents the same achievements will carry different weights. One really proud mother will extoll their child’s accomplishments and virtues while another will take them for granted- of course kid did this because s/he has the ability.
btw, kids do not need to know grades to know who is smart/smarter/smartest in their classes- at any age. Like the OP’s kid, they can tell. You do not “overlook” the ability, you accept it like you accept that some kids are fast runners/swimmers, etc. while you work hard to achieve similar or nearly the same results (or not).
As has been said for many years on CC- value the kid on the couch. OP- be proud your kid can recognize abilities in others.
One issue is that med school admissions has gotten keenly competitive from the mid-'90s onward. When HS classmates and a few cousins were applying to med school back then, having a cumulative undergrad GPA of 3.3 was already considered too low to ensure success in gaining admission to any US based AMA accredited medical school even with an outstanding MCAT score…and it seems to have gotten worse since.
Nowadays, even a 3.5-3.6 is considered right on the borderline or even “too low” to ensure one has a viable chance at being admitted to a US based AMA accredited med school.
This phenomenon ends up feeding the high anxieties among many pre-meds who may seem to be petty grade grubbers to many folks, but who are really reacting to information they’re hearing from older pre-meds/med school students and even pre-med advisors like the ones I overheard during my undergrad years.
Depends as being perceived as smart merely by social interaction or even classroom discussions isn’t necessarily reflected in one’s grades or in the professional world, perception of one’s quality, timeliness, and effectiveness of one’s work/professionalism by colleagues and supervisors. In some cases, it can be considered a curse if there’s a mismatch between one’s high level of smarts and less than optimal grades/professional effectiveness in the workplace.
For instance, a few college classmates I had are as smart/smarter than myself from social interactions and observing them in class/co-curricular discussions or professional meetings after college.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t necessarily reflected in their grades or the quality and timeliness of their work product as their GPAs were such they ended up on academic suspension and/or in the workplace, getting less than satisfactory employee evaluations from their supervisors for the mediocre or worse quality of the work product and/or not turning it in by the deadline set by the supervisor/client. In some cases, this became such an issue maintaining employment for more than a few months at a time was a serious issue. I’ve been trying to help/get help to ameliorate the effects of “burnt bridges” they are still feeling to this day.
On the flipside, classmates and colleagues who weren’t seemingly as smart as they were had no issues turning in satisfactory or better performances which meant they had many more post-college and professional advancement opportunities in the workplace.
I just looked at the Harvard Statistics department. They have a bunch of G-6s and one G-8
Median time to humanities PhD is 9 years, longer then sciences and social sciences in part because it is a too solitary, writing project. https://mlaresearch.commons.mla.org/2014/05/14/opportunity-costs-of-the-phd-the-problem-of-time-to-degree/
The average time to completing a PhD in Poli-sci was hitting around 8 years and change last I checked sometime in the mid '00s. It wasn’t much less than some humanities fields.
Length of time could increase due to other factors out of the candidate’s control such as advisor forcing a complete change of topic/substantial revision with the same effect for reasons which could be quite arbitrary** or sudden lack of access to critical primary research sources*.
- A grad classmate of a Prof studying Soviet history suddenly had his access to a critical archive cutoff without any prior warning or explanation sometime in the '70s. Ended up having to start on a completely new topic after spending 2 years researching the old one.
** An online friend who just finished his PhD in Modern French history in the UK was forced to add a chapter on what was an extremely tangential topic to his dissertation during his PhD defense because it was the pet specialization of a senior influential Prof on his dissertation defense committee. His advisor didn’t have enough influence to counteract what even he felt was an uncalled for change.
The poor job market slows dissertating students, too. To have a chance at a good job (as faculty or not), the graduate student needs to develop a broad range of research methods and experiences. Scientists may finish faster, but then get on the post-doc path. I do think we are off topic, unless we are making the point that academic and intellectual success is a long process, requring many skills beyond glibness.
Repeat- kids can tell the smart ones without knowing grades. NOT from “social interactions”, either. Smart kids are the ones who usually know the answers and give good responses from day one. They figure things out fast. Other kids notice this. In fact, some may be surprised that the gifted kid in the class has terrible grades because that kid may not do the work because s/he is bored.
Young people can have great potential, whether or not they “live up to their potential” is another thing. Plus- why does one need to max out? Does being the top whatever need to be achieved just because one could? Etc.
I teach my kids that hard work beat natural ability every time. At any top college you will find that the students are smart, but also hard working. Being smart enough that you don’t have to work hard is rare.
The key is working smart not just working hard. Not all the students at top colleges are hard working
Good responses can depend on who is doing the judging…even among experienced teachers/faculty. For instance, the very same lines of comments/arguments which got me dinged by some HS teachers were ones which ended up getting me high participation grades and offers for great LORs from undergrad and grad Profs.
Also, knowing the answers doesn’t necessarily mean one is smart. It could merely mean one is a diligent “hard worker” who has done great preparation which is good…but that’s not necessarily enough proof one is smart per se.
As for low grades, that could also be due to other factors ranging from hitting the academic wall at an accelerated learning environment to feeling one’s own perceived great smartness entitles one to not even bother putting in a minimal effort to getting one’s academic/professional work done.
And I’m not too sympathetic to the “I’m bored” argument to excuse noncompletion of work or doing so in an untimely and/or slipshod manner by a student/colleague. A part of life is learning how to remain effective in one’s job/life while dealing with boring aspects of one’s job/life*. Granted, part of where I’m coming from is due to the fact I’ve encountered far too many folks in college and to a far lesser extent, in the workplace who are genuinely smart…but who were so unmotivated and lazy that the supervisors and colleagues felt that smartness was meaningless because he/she wasn’t effective in getting stuff done or in the workplace…contributing to the work team.
- Heck, I struggle with this myself...but I understand that the onus is on me to deal with this issue...not for others to make life interesting or otherwise entertain me so I'm no longer bored.
You’ve been “within earshot of pre-med friends’ pre-med advisors”? Is this supposed to count as factual evidence of your post?
I understand that med school admissions are very competitive. Every student with an eye towards med school should probably shoot for a 4.0 GPA and the highest MCAT score they can manage. Etc., etc.
However, I looked at the stats of 2014 accepted students at a top 25 USA med school (not an Ivy, but a far far cry from being in the Caribbean) and see that the average GPA is a little over 3.8. But the range of accepted students was 3.1 to 4.0
It’s a good thing that the 3.1 GPA student persevered in the face of myths such as the one above.
It’s extremely likely that 3.1 GPA admit had so many hooks* and exceptional accomplishments well-above and beyond your average med school applicant that the pre-med advisor at his/her college felt he/she was worth going to bat for. That’s not really the case with most pre-meds with GPAs less than 3.5-3.6.
For most pre-med applicants as with many areas of life where there’s some substantial financial or time costs involved, it’s usually a poor strategy to assume one will always be one of the unique exceptions in the absence of evidence one has exceptional applicable bona-fides med school adcoms would take into favorable consideration to begin with.
In fact, assuming one will be an exception to the rule is a form of magical thinking which has gotten many into substantial trouble…such as several law graduates I know who ended up with ginormous debt and poor/no job prospects upon graduation because they assumed they’d be the exceptions who’d graduate in the upper 2/3s** or top 5-10%*** of their graduating law school class.
- Being a co-author/principle author of articles published in some notable medically related research in a topflight medical journals.
** Top 14 law schools outside the top 3-5.
*** Lower-tiered ones
Who said anything about assuming one will be the exception to the rule? The assumption made was that having just under a 3.5 or 3.6 GPA meant that the applicant’s chances for getting into med school were “NIL” based on an overheard conversation from 20 years ago.
Med school apps are very competitive. NO DOUBT. But there are no absolutes about GPAs when there are other factors which can balance those. A counselor who automatically tells a student his chances are NIL based on a sub 3.6 GPA without taking other factors into consideration would be doing a disservice to the student. As with most things it just depends
There are a variety of paths. For example, the lowest 2 Stanford undergrad GPA med school admits on MD Applicants are summarized below. Neither appears to have huge hooks in a traditional sense. Instead both did a post bacc with a high GPA, had a high MCAT, and had several years of relevant experience.
2.9 undergrad GPA, 35 MCAT, White – Worked as Army med corps officer for several years, which inspired him to pursue medical school, so did a post bacc where he received a 3.9 GPA. Accepted to 4 med schools before he started withdrawing applications.
2.9 undergrad GPA, 34 MCAT, White – Poor grades because worked full time job during college while being on an athletic team. Worked in bio tech sales for several years after graduation, then did post bacc where she received a 3.96 GPA.
However, doing a post-bacc as a remedy for poor undergrad GPA/pre-med grades was something most pre-meds I knew wanted to avoid doing as it added more time and expense* before one even started med school.
- Several friends and colleagues who did post-baccs for med school really paid through the nose for those programs with little/no financial aid/scholarship and fewer loan options available. A few like a colleague who left in the middle of his post-bacc never finished for financial reasons.