My roommate freshman year at Cal was on the football team (and later went to play in the NFL). He took a physics “for poets” class by a great professor (George

My roommate freshman year at Cal was on the football team (and later went to play in the NFL). He took a physics “for poets” class by a great professor (George Smoot) and he’d talk about how awesome it was. A couple of years later I had a different roommate who did some research for the same professor. Smoot later went on to win a Nobel. I had two different roommates with very different abilities both benefit from having this world class professor as part of their lives. Many of my CS and physics professors were “famous” but also great professors. In contrast, I thought most of my math professors were terrible. As they were bad at teaching, I simply assumed they must have been good at research.