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Aug 7, 2022Liked by Aaron Bergman

Thanks so much for this post, Aaron!! It covers a lot that desperately needs to be better-known by nerdy kids in the US.

Story time: in 1997, I was rejected from all five of "HYPMS" despite a 1600 SAT and a single-author paper in a major computer science conference. (BUT: I was 15 years old, had uneven grades and no sports or music or "leadership," and indeed had "escaped" from high school early, getting a G.E.D. instead.) Once you understand how undergrad admissions work, this outcome wasn't surprising in the slightest, though at the time it felt like a death sentence.

I went to Cornell, one of two places (along with Carnegie Mellon) generous enough to admit me with this bizarre record. I got an excellent education there, and ended up at my first choice of PhD program (Berkeley).

Truthfully, in the long run the rejections may have helped me, by filling me with a burning motivation to do enough in science that someday the rejections would be a point of pride. And whenever I get depressed, I can tell myself that at least I can now cross that particular teenage fantasy off the list -- having, e.g., been tenured faculty at one of the same fine institutions (MIT) that rejected me for undergrad.

These days I run the Quantum Information Center at UT Austin, where almost every year I meet undergrads who I would've been thrilled to have at MIT.

I'm sharing this here because I hope some nerdy, academics-focused kid who feels like their life is over because they got rejected from HYPMS will read it, and it will mean something to them.

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Aug 7, 2022Liked by Aaron Bergman

I had 1570/1600 on the SATs and a fair number of APs.

I actually ended up attending a liberal arts college that wasn't even the most well-known liberal arts college in Iowa. Like RulerofFranks, I'd note that I wasn't clearly the smartest person in my college, and several of my peers went and excelled at elite grad programs afterwards (I didn't).

I don't have nearly as stellar a record of intellectual success as Scott after college, but I think I performed reasonably well compared to most people I know at Ivy-tier places. Certainly by EA lights I've done activities that are more likely to be highly impactful, and I do not think I usually come across as dumb, even in highly selective settings.

I think one difference I notice between my younger self and the people from elite universities I interact with these days is that the elite university undergrads by and large come across as substantially more *mature* than I was at that age. I'm not sure how much this is a pattern, but in retrospect, there's a certain story where it makes sense that selecting on real-world (or deep extracurricular) success would by and large produce more emotionally/socially mature people than selecting on raw intellect or academic success.

Fortunately maturity is something that appears highly changeable with age. :P

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deletedAug 7, 2022·edited Aug 7, 2022Liked by Aaron Bergman
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