I’ll take my mother’s relative over these choices any day. A boy who was whisked off to the UofChicago at the tender age of 15 to study physics, which was two years later than the various advisors thought … advisable. At about age 9 or 10, officials in his rural school district told his mother, “We really don’t have much left for him, and if you don’t get him out of here he’s going to get bored and find trouble,” which is exactly what happened.
He obtained his PhD at Chicago at age 21 and went on to become one of the youngest tenured professors in the very long and storied history of Harvard University, which he left long ago to head up the physics department of a major research powerhouse, where he’s been since.
He did this coming from Bumble **** Nowhere USA and absolutely no access to a quality preparatory education, support, influence or benefit of the doubt of any kind whatsoever. I’m a lawyer, so I mean no disrespect here, but I’m going with a guy who’s spent his life working with other truly brilliant people trying to answer the big with a capital “B” questions of existence over anybody in law or banking. Please. There are people who are smart and who work their fingers to the bone and can’t come anywhere near the zip code of where people like this guy operate while taking a nap.
And perhaps (I’ve never met her after all) unlike our young legal beagle prodigy here, you’d never know any of this about this guy if you met him because he would spend all of the time peppering you with questions about you and your life with sincere interest.