<p>I guess my son would qualify as a “top student.” He graduated from MIT. So would my daughter, who graduated from Reed. They had and have full and active social lives.</p>
<p>What I saw as a parent and teacher is that the best students do NOT spend all their time studying. They don’t need to. School work comes easily to them. They have interests and passions and spend time on those, putting in enough time to make sure they understand all the work required of them.</p>
<p>I have a good friend who went from the Baltimore slums (his single mother worked as a waitress in a longshoremen’s bar) to a master’s in EECS from MIT. As an undergrad at MIT, he dated three women at the same time, spending enough time with all of them that they found the relationships rewarding. I never saw him study. NEVER. He did go to all his classes and attended study groups to get his problems sets done. Today he’s the CTO (Chief Technical Officer) at a major engineering company.</p>