<p>One of the manifold advantages of being <em>cough</em> years old is that I’ve had a fairly long period of time to see all sorts of approaches to both success and failure. Thank you for your insights.</p>
<p>Junior is a smart kid. Junior can also be stubborn, opinionated, and impervious to suggestion. I’ve also seen him trying to teach algebra to 11-year-olds, patiently helping someone learn to read a topo map, and explaining how to code a PID algorithm to his actress/writer/non-math-friendly mother. Junior is – in my experience – a fairly typical mess of adolescence. I’ve been priveleged to spend seven years as a Boy Scout leader, and am starting my third year as a mentor for a FIRST robotics team, so I’ve had more than a casual amount of contact with utes. </p>
<p>My initial comments about Junior up there in post 1 were meant to be light-hearted and humorous. I think anyone starting college should do so with a certain amount of humble appreciation that there are levels of understanding in almost any field that are hard to see from the foothills of high school. That Junior hasn’t figured this out yet (it’s not like he’s going to believe me) is not particularly surprising to me. It is funny, however, in a dark way. I know someone else in my family (ahem) who was passionately interested in international relations and signed up for an upper division seminar in his first term of his freshman year. Hilarity ensued and “this person” learned a little humility pretty quickly. The apple does not fall far from the overly confident tree.</p>