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If you don't mind, could you elaborate a bit? How was being around academics/children of academics beneficial to you? Did you end up going into academia, and di

• kafkaesq 10y ago
  The one parent of mine who did have a degree got theirs in a STEM field, so exposure to the parents of some friends who had PhDs in the humanities (with books floor-to-ceiling, reading newspapers in languages with alphabets I had neither seen nor dreamt of -- this was pre-internet, and "middle America", to a first-order approximation, mind you) was quite an eye-opener. It was like they were just on different plane, intellectually (though also very grounded, and nothing at all like the detached, academic stereotype). I can imagine it might have mattered even more if they were math or science PhDs -- again, this was pre-internet; so I never heard of the International Math Olympiads until my later years of college, actually (way past the age when it would have mattered). I ended up not going into academia, but it was a serious consideration for quite a while (and yes, the early role models definitely helped).