<p>Being at a high level in mathematics or science requires a high level of verbal/right-brained ability. So this is the most important reason to push yourself in this area.</p>
<p>People who only loves math will be doomed to darwinism, because the sociality and colleges put math as the most unimportant subject in the world. No body cares about math, no one in my school have real passion for math.</p>
<p>The consequence of your lack of studies in the humanities is starting to show.</p>
<p>I think I know enough to know what college are good enough for me.</p>
<p>Well its nice to know that you think MIT is good enough for you. So…how many different scientific publications do you have? Did you get a perfect score on the Putnam exam every year in middle school or did you flop once?</p>
<p>In all honesty, just how high do you place yourself in math to make such statements? Do you really think you are comparable to Erdos?</p>
<p>few things:</p>
<p>1) Work on your grammar. If how you are writing here is how you express yourself you can add that to reasons why you will not get into many colleges. If these are typos, then learn to proof read.</p>
<p>2) Two things at the same time as “bad work ethics”. It is called multitasking. I would love to only do one thing at a time. Have you ever heard the expression “If you want something done, give it to a busy person”. There is truth in that statement.</p>
<p>3) Two works: Attitude and Effort. I tell my children (21 and 16) that that is what is expected from them. The grade is not important if they have given their full out effort. Doing a terrible job on a “stupid” homework or project is not accepted because it is a bad attitude (as well as effort).</p>
<p>Your mother’s advice, as described here, was poor. Plagiarism has huge penalties at the college level and copying homework is a form of it. What a bad habit to even think about starting. Do your work and do it well.</p>
<p>Good luck on making your changes. If you are sincere, it will eventually pay off but maybe not in time to get you into MIT.</p>
<p>I suck at grammar. and I don’t think I can improve it by much. This is something I know I can’t do. I’m not good enough for human grammar.</p>
<p>People who does sports get into many good colleges because they are good at sports. People like that always get a GPA of 4.0 or something? What’s so amazing about sports? Humans body’s ability in strength are nothing compare to machines. Cars can run faster than human. Planes can fly, Humans can’t. I know it’s impressive to be best at something. But is that really a great use of human? are human just suppose to be good with their own muscles? Maybe in 200 years or something, there are machines can match anything a human can do with his body.</p>
<p>I have hard time explaining myself. By the “good enough for me” I mean the work load is good enough for me to handle. as I tries to directly answers your question of I can’t handle the work load.</p>
<p>
In fact, I suck at math, I’m just better than most average people, but not in the tops. But that’s what I do best, so I will do what I can do best instead of everything else. That’s economically efficient.</p>
<p>I am not a well rounded person, too bad, I can’t get into MIT. I have paid my price, and I will live with it. I made the choice.</p>
<p>Effort, it’s about opportunity costs. What’s most valuable to me. My value system told me putting effort in something is not worth it then I don’t do it. Work ethics, I found it important, but there are values even more important, so I had sacrificed myself for those values, maybe I did the wrong thing. Multitasking only if there is the ability or resource for multitasking. If a CPU is running at 100% level, getting another program running will decrease the performance of other programs.</p>
<p>I really want to go to good college just because I can learn enough materials to do things I can’t do right now. Maybe, what I’m currently working on already done by someone else. And since I’m not in college, I don’t have the nice study groups around me. No one else in my community cares about math, no one can interact with me on math topics. They have all kind of other things to do, sports, dances, drinking or even science(math is not science) and other not math stuff. </p>
<p>Am I a texture-less person? maybe. I don’t do crazy stuff or go out my comfort zone or anything I don’t like. That’s might be the definition texture-less of it.
I do have my own views and opinions, I do not follow what my parent’s orders, I do w/e I think it’s best for me. But these are not important. After all, I don’t have any really impressive achievement in the community. I don’t have the enthusiastic to save pets from the street, or giving food to the poor. I do want to change the community, but not in those kind of actions.</p>
<p>Humans are social beings, they suppose to care about their community right? I think it’s more like ants. Each ants do they own job and do their job good, the colony will benefit from it.</p>
<p>
evidence?</p>
<p>I can not see math have anything to do with verbal skills. Math language are completely logical. there are simple syntax to explain everything.
Human language are flawed, synonyms, homograph. The language itself can be ambiguous even if the words have only one definition, for example, in English “He ate the cookies on the couch,” can mean 2 different things. Humans have problem program something to automatically translate one language to another. Why is “I am” not “I is”? Who made rules like that? History did. Why don’t everyone just use the metric system, but creating a lot of useless computation of conversions. Why 24 hours? Why not start using other bases, is base 10 really the most efficient ones out there, I hate when Pi day is in march 14th, it’s irrational, why are we using base 10? why are we using a strange unit for time to decide the date for Pi day? Why aren’t the most common words the shortest? Why are there past, present tenses, there are language can function without them and still imply something happened in the past or present.
Many strange conventions left behind by the history are still in used today because people just don’t change.</p>
<p>I’m a transhumanist, I believe the entire human race is flawed. Humans should only do one thing–make choices and experience the consequence. artificial limbs and other things will be great enhancement to the body. Essentially, to me, humans are super computers doesn’t follow the rules correctly(in mass scale). The human body doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>I want changes the community by bring ways to allow humans become less dependent on their body, but more dependent on their mind and technology. I want the change to happen. I might not have the idea to help the poor, but I support the replacement of humans’ fundamental conventions with improved versions. Time for an upgrade.</p>
<p>I want to go to good colleges to make changes happen. I want the world to follow more logical rules.</p>
<p>Because I’m short sighted, I destroyed my chance of making a change by having bad work ethics. Not a good outcome, but I have to accept it. Life don’t give second chances.</p>
<p>“evidence?”</p>
<p>Hm…no evidence off-hand, although many of the great Greek mathematicians were also philosophers. Perhaps you would call that empirical evidence. I have personally found that the guys that were super in terms of the left brain did outstanding in calculus but hit a brick wall in subjects like abstract algebra. The guys that were more verbal were able to get their hands around the more slippery subject matter. It’s hard to describe abstract algebra if you haven’t done it yourself–in the preface of one book I remember it being described as kind of a foggy subject. </p>
<p>Oppenheimer, the outstanding physicist who led the Manhattan Project, also thought there was a common line of developing arguments in both physics and the humanities. Feynman might disagree with that, though.</p>
<p>Also, functionally one of my professors said that scientists essentially are professional writers in that they are either applying for grants or writing papers so a high degree of writing skill is key. However, I think there is something more fundamental than that.</p>
<p>Hi mgccl,</p>
<p>I can feel what you feel. You think that it’s unfair because you think that intellectual ability is not reflected on your GPA, right? that some others, maybe not as capable as you, do the homeworks (maybe with plagiarism), and spend the time make them nicer looking, and eventually, get a higher GPA than you, right?</p>
<p>Especially in the subjects related like history, economics, for example, usually there is no definite answer. As a maths person myself too, I tend to make a “beautiful” solution to my every economics assignment, so critical that even I argue the standard text-book approach is not sufficient/appropriate for so and so reason. Personally, I don’t hate any of my subjects. However, in the economics case, it’s the teacher whom I really feel disheartened. Should I ever make my argument to her why the standard approach is not working, she would say, “well, I am just telling you how the IB is going to grade you.”, which isn’t really helpful in my learning. Besides, I highly doubt my economics teacher really know IB that well, since she just came, and had no teaching experience before in the IB curriculum. So, I really can’t tell whether she’s helping me or not. </p>
<p>Ironically, in my school, some people seem to be striking the chord with my economics teacher, by simply applying the standard approach. All they do is basically memorization and applying what they learn without questioning, which sounds very robotic. But still, since the teacher subjectively likes their works, they receive better grades than me in the humanity subjects. What I find though they are not the kind of creative people like us, mathematicians. After my one and a half years of studying economics, recently I learn that, fundamentally, economics is just full of cr#p information that we have to take for granted. But since recently, I also learn to become unworldly. Why not just turn it into your own advantage? Since recently, I’ve been working on past IB economics papers, looking through the whole syllabus and sample answers. I start to get a feel what kind of answers the IB examiners want. All I am going to do is to defy the predicted grade that my economics teacher has given to me. In the IB examination in May this year, I’ll just score really high, and get a nice looking IB diploma.</p>
<p>Of course, as an applicant to MIT myself this year, MIT will not know my real grades which only come out after the IB exam in May is finished. By then, it’s already and utterly after when the decision comes out. This is my concern at the moment. I am thinking of posting my such problem as another thread here… you guys can help me??</p>
<p>Anyhow, as you are a junior, my advice is to make yourself feel interested in your humanity subjects. Put the idea of GPA away at the moment. And ask why your teacher how you can improve, specifically in order to see how she grades. In this way, even if you don’t learn anything from these subjects you don’t like, you still learn something about the philosophy of life, which you can possibly add to your MIT application next year…</p>
<p>Any way, I suggest you, mgccl, also help me on another thread of mine I shall create imediately here in this MIT forum. 
What I do this year, and no matter what the outcome is for me, I will tell you so you know better what to do for your MIT application next year. What do you have to loose ? :p</p>
<p>collegealum314:
k k
I don’t know if there are counter examples… [The</a> Two Cultures](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures"]The”>The Two Cultures - Wikipedia) says it’s harmful if the sciences and the humanities can’t understand each other. Which can point out the people in science are not good in humanities. Verbal skills are humanity skills. Then people in science are not always good with verbal skills. I can see how verbal skills help. I never took abstract algebra, but I will read about it sometime.
Verbal skills are impossible to improve.</p>
<p>jackwang:
I think it’s not fair. But I can understand it’s now. I never read the rule book of life. That cost me my opportunity. I think anything bad happens to anyone is his own fault. This applies to me too.
Make your post. I will do my best to help you.</p>
<p>Mgccl, in general, what I stress is to value things like fame or materialistic gain like GPA less for example, but focus on things you like. You can’t buy friendship, or happiness. I choose to apply to MIT because after talking with the interviewer, I’d imagine people there have great dreams and ambitions, whom I am more than willing to befriend with, and to achieve something great together. Don’t value everything in terms of value and cost. Take it as lesson you learn. 失敗乃成功之母</p>
<p>Any way, Don’t wanna make myself seem like I am preaching you like other people do. I’ve already made my thread here about IB predicted grades, at CC’s MIT forum. You can find it very easily.</p>
<p>I just read through the board and thought there were a few things I could contribute. I am a senior and an applicant to MIT. While I can understand mgccl is frustrated I think there is somehting he can do. First off i can understand not wanting to do work outside of math and/or science, the truth is that it will enrich your life. I am well aware of the fact that my weakest point in my work is expressing my ideas (something that takes a lot of effort on my part that I sometimes resent). Despite all this effort, this weakness occasionally crops up in ways beyond my control. One way I have found to overcome this is to tackle it as though it were a challenge. Some people here have suggested you have some feeling of entitlement if thats the case this could be a difficult thing to start doing. Perhaps you could approach it as though you were trying to prove others wrong, or as some personal quest to overcome your current predicament. And even if the best you can do is achieve a 3.5 thats still better than a 3.2, besides the turnaround and subsequent effort might be a topic of discussion somewhere in your app.</p>
<p>One thing we emphasized at home to our kids from a young age was that writing skills are just as important as math skills. If a scientist/mathematician can’t present her ideas in a clear, expressive way, she may never get the credit due her. It took a while for that message to sink in, but both kids have become excellent writers. </p>
<p>In the real world, I used to work at a major consulting firm with a group of math majors and liberal arts majors who were good in math. The folks who could write well were the ones who were promoted – and then I spent time training the math people to communicate technical concepts in terms their clients could understand. The clear path to promotion was the ability to communicate effectively in writing.</p>