Tell me a story

Give that kid a GoA ID and let her post.

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This gets me every time. Where I’m from this would mean you were the one coming up with the questions, not the one answering them.

Well, I certainly had questions.

Like the TA that marked one of my papers and wrote the comment “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here. -1”. Lol. yeah, you and me both buddy.

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Related story, in a 3rd year stats class, me paying rigourous attention to everything. Prof is going through an example, and uses a property on a variable. Me: sticks up hand, “How do we know X has that property?”.
The prof actually pauses while the wheel turns. Then he says “because we defined it that way in the question?”.
That was the last time I asked a question during class.

But at least I used to bring cookies a couple times a year to all my classes. So I got that going for me.

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Math is hard, k.

I can still remember the first time a prof started with “lets define f as the set of all functions on xyz”

In my undergrad (I was like 50yo) I’m sitting in an actsci class. The class could be full, and nobody would sit on either side of me lol. Which is fine. ONe day a student comes up, plops down beside me and introduces himself. We became friends. Buddy was super smart with a capital s.
So we wrote a midterm and I get <80, and he gets deep into the 90’s. So I’m complaining, I’m old and not smart and I can’t get the marks, and I studied like over an hour a night for the last week or two…
And he responded with ‘I studied like 3 hours a night for the last 2-3 weeks’.
So that not only shut me up about being old, it was the start of me figuring out that marks are almost entirely correlated with study methods and practices, not naturally 'smarts. Smart people aren’t smarter. Or maybe they are, but it’s irrelevant. Smart people work better and harder, that’s what makes them smarter.

that interaction was the start of my marks increasing substantially. They were pretty darn good by the last few terms of my undergrad.

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imo, both stories are true. You can be fast and sharp, or slow and studious, or both. If you’re both you don’t become an actuary, you become a theoretical physicist.

I was a lazybones in college, and I wonder often if I could have been a contender, if I had just also been studious. Who knows.

Good story though. :slight_smile: It checks out with the above story about the Polgar sisters.

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Well im.sure both are true. But i recall a guy who was super smart. He also used to jump out his bedroom window and brush his teeth while standing in a snowbank in his underwear.

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