Nerdiness at Yale

IxnayBob
Sun, 05 Apr 2015 04:44:29 +0000

MathInduction:

I’d love to be at a place where no matter how hard the problem sets are, people want to do them not just because they’re due but because they’re genuinely interested in tackling incredibly challenging problems (and are curious about further problems/the implications of the solutions even once those problems are solved).

I don’t think that you’ll have difficulty finding kids who are genuinely interested in the subject matter. Nobody takes Math 230 at Yale, or Math 55 at Harvard, if they’re not intensely interested in the math and doing the psets. My son has finished a CS pset and then changed the data structures just to see if he can tweak the speed a bit. He is not alone in that; kids who quickly say “eh, good enough, I want to play Xbox” probably are not admitted to these schools.