4 ms·

I’m surprised no one has chimed in with their own experience yet. I was in one of these programs (well, a moderate version of one, I didn’t skip grades or go to

I’m surprised no one has chimed in with their own experience yet. I was in one of these programs (well, a moderate version of one, I didn’t skip grades or go to college young) and I remember being told all the time that we were the future leaders of the world. I became good friends with many of these people and really, we all turned out really normal. Not much different from folks not in those programs. I think I’ll do more research on the history of these programs because I had no idea that it was a relic of WWII and the Cold War. Really interesting to me.

indigochill 6y ago
I didn't have any "gifted child" thing as a young kid (was homeschooled until high school, did quite well but not astronomically in high school). However, thanks to scoring a 1510/1600 on the SAT and having good grades, I did get placed in a fairly prestigious cohort in college. My takeaway from that is that the person's natural talent is just one factor, and not even a particularly important one. It still takes a mix of actual work and capitalizing on good connections (in our case, we got hooked up with good connections thanks to being in this cohort) to get ahead. Maybe half of those kids that entered the cohort washed out or decided to go into other fields unrelated to the cohort (which I did). Some others got very normal jobs of no particular prestige. I know a handful that leveraged it into fairly prestigious jobs in our field. My brother's another data point. He moved through grades in math at about 2x the rate of the rest of us, so clearly had a gift for it. He was tutoring college kids by high school and from then on has been making his living from math tutoring, including some gifted children of the early-college variety. What's a little strange to me is that he seems to have no natural ambition. It's like he's totally dialed into math tutoring to the exclusion of considering anything else. But if that's really his thing as it seems to be, then more power to him.
- richajak 6y ago
  Also never been considered as gifted for my relatively normal IQ. However for a brief period during my teenage years, I suddenly became the top rank student in my school for an unknown reason that I still cannot comprehend. It was such an experience, as I was a normal student before that. I thought I was a genius who could ace any subject. I managed to enter top university with early admission for my good grades. Too bad, I became 'normal' after that, discovered that a lot of people were smarter than me. It was a humbling experience of not being special anymore. Nevertheless, I am still grateful for that brief experience. I have much more self confidence of my ability to solve any problem since then. Eventually I managed to subtitute my 'giftedness' with hard work.

indigochill 6y ago

I didn't have any "gifted child" thing as a young kid (was homeschooled until high school, did quite well but not astronomically in high school). However, thanks to scoring a 1510/1600 on the SAT and having good grades, I did get placed in a fairly prestigious cohort in college. My takeaway from that is that the person's natural talent is just one factor, and not even a particularly important one. It still takes a mix of actual work and capitalizing on good connections (in our case, we got hooked up with good connections thanks to being in this cohort) to get ahead. Maybe half of those kids that entered the cohort washed out or decided to go into other fields unrelated to the cohort (which I did). Some others got very normal jobs of no particular prestige. I know a handful that leveraged it into fairly prestigious jobs in our field. My brother's another data point. He moved through grades in math at about 2x the rate of the rest of us, so clearly had a gift for it. He was tutoring college kids by high school and from then on has been making his living from math tutoring, including some gifted children of the early-college variety. What's a little strange to me is that he seems to have no natural ambition. It's like he's totally dialed into math tutoring to the exclusion of considering anything else. But if that's really his thing as it seems to be, then more power to him.

richajak 6y ago
Also never been considered as gifted for my relatively normal IQ. However for a brief period during my teenage years, I suddenly became the top rank student in my school for an unknown reason that I still cannot comprehend. It was such an experience, as I was a normal student before that. I thought I was a genius who could ace any subject. I managed to enter top university with early admission for my good grades. Too bad, I became 'normal' after that, discovered that a lot of people were smarter than me. It was a humbling experience of not being special anymore. Nevertheless, I am still grateful for that brief experience. I have much more self confidence of my ability to solve any problem since then. Eventually I managed to subtitute my 'giftedness' with hard work.