math team

I am an exemplary student, one who never misses a class, who almost always gets the best grades, who is the pride of his teachers. Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him.

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking.

From that moment on, I relied on a formula: follow the successful path. Get good grades, and do what’s seen as impressive.

Before math camp, he’d told himself that he was smarter than other people. Math camp disproved that theory. “This feels like the place for me more than anyplace I’ve ever been,” he said. “But I’m below average. I didn’t think there was anything about me that made me special, and it bothered me. Nothing I did—no pieces of knowledge I had—set me apar