When I was in primary school (UK) aged about 10 I got flagged by a teacher for being gifted at Maths. At the time there was a local government scheme that put o

When I was in primary school (UK) aged about 10 I got flagged by a teacher for being gifted at Maths. At the time there was a local government scheme that put on little lessons at the local research intensive University on a Saturday morning. For me that was incredibly eye opening; nobody in my family had ever been to University and for the first time I also met people who had a shared interest in maths. The cohort of students was very diverse too. I did that for maybe 6 years and then due to cuts it closed down. At that point the staff tried to take it private and it ticked on for a few years during which I used to go and help (first Saturday job!). It was really really great for me, gave me a lot of exposure to advanced things way earlier, and not necessarily things that were on the normal syllabus either, so it didn't leap me forwards ahead of people in school, just gave me a much broader exposure to what maths was. I ended up doing a degree in Theoretical Physics and then a doctorate in computational physics. I vaguely kept in touch with a couple of guys from it, another one did a doctorate is now a researcher in Chemistry and the other did a degree in maths and is a software developer as well.