4.
“I went to college at 16, a gifted program at a university, for kids like me. I didn’t take foreign language, music, gym, health, personal finance, art, and history. By my second year of high school, I was in AP physics, calculus, biology, chemistry, English, and an ACT prep course. I spent lunch with my teachers. No friends. I got to this university, and I crashed and burned. Suddenly, sitting in class and doing my homework while the professor talked didn’t work. I had no clue how to study, or what to do if I didn’t immediately understand a concept.”
“Before I started there, I had already toured Harvard and met with an adviser in their physics department. My plan was to go to grad school there, and become a theoretical physicist. Well, turns out you need to know calculus for that. I got a C on my first calculus exam, and the dean of the school came to my dorm to put me on academic probation. My second semester there, I got a D in Calculus 2. I was still 16. They told me if I didn’t take over the summer, I might be kicked out of the school.
I don’t remember my entire time there, or much of that summer. I know other horrible stuff happened there; I just don’t remember. We were all locked in at 8:00 to study. We weren’t allowed to have our cars, or leave the campus. We couldn’t go into dorm halls that weren’t ours, and we weren’t allowed to get less than a B. I finished my associates at a community college, feeling like a true failure. I couldn’t even succeed there. I couldn’t listen. I definitely couldn’t learn. Studying was impossible. I got B’s in some classes. I was embarrassed; I would never be a physicist. I had no friends or social skills. I didn’t know how to balance a job and laundry. I had agoraphobia, extreme anxiety, and eventually was diagnosed with ADHD.
I found medicine, my love. I work in a world class pediatric ICU. I was never again a ‘genius’ in school, but obviously I worked hard enough to get into school and study medicine, even as ‘average.’”
—bekahgrace96
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahmarder/former-gifted-kids-are-sharing-its-effects
