Some of you know exactly what I'm talking about; others not so much. To the former, know that I trusted you enough to reveal the dark patch in my soul. To the latter, know that I valued your respect and friendship so highly that I was hesitant to tell you of my treachery.
Here it is then: I am currently enrolled in a class entitled, "The Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans". There are a number of alleviating notes to this point, but as I said, that's for another day. For now, go ahead and bash me. In fact, if you don't, I promise I will bash you for being a business lover.
Now, to the actual post:
At the end of the lecture today, the speaker invited students in the audience to give an elevator pitch, either for a team to join their project or for funding from venture capitalists. One guy gets up and introduces himself as Nico from Harvard. The audience lets out a groan. Then Nico starts talking:
"Most of you watch TED Talks, right? Well, there was recently this one talk by _______ where he's discussing this assignment given to kindergarten students in the UK. The kids were asked to draw what they wanted to be when they grew up. Most of the kids made recognizable pictures of firemen, nurses, etc, but one girl was drawing feverishly in a little corner in the back of the room. The teacher asked her what she was trying to draw, and she responded, "God". The teacher stumbled and then responded, "But nobody knows what God looks like". The girl responded, "They will in a moment."
Just another example of the faith that kids have in their own ability. And they do, definitely. There's kids all over the country interested in and passionate about different things, and they have no way to funnel this passion. Some of them are lucky enough to have great parents, but parents can only offer support, not physical resources. And despite all of the potential these kids have, for one reason or another most of them lose their ambitions as life goes on.
I was one of these kids. I grew up in inner city Detroit, and I worked hard as a kid. I had dreams like all of them, but somewhere along the line things didn't go the way I planned. I dropped out of college after my freshman year and found myself jobless in San Francisco. I had no idea then what I wanted to do with my life, and I spent the next 7 years of my life selling books door to door while I tried to figure it out. I finally got it: I enrolled as a student at Columbia University to pursue an economics degree. While at Columbia, I served as President of student activities (something like that) for two years, and I had a experience similar to what these two VCs have been describing. I met with so many college students hoping to organize events and run programs that they neither had the money or the manpower to execute.
Something clicked. Shortage of manpower? But there are all these interested high school kids who can help! All we need is to give them the chance. What I'd like to do is set up a program to link a kid in Florida, interested in Global Warming, with a kid in Alaska, interested in Clean Tech, to a kid in West Virginia interested in eco-friendly coal tech, and link all of them to, say, the Environment and Energy Initiatives at Harvard.
A survey was recently given to pre-college students asking if they believed that there was a Bill Gates in their generation. More than 80% answered that they did. 62% answered that they actually knew this person, and 25% answered that they were this person. These kids are out there, waiting to make a difference and lead us forward. Let's give them the chance to do it."
I'm just transcribing from memory, and he sounded much better in person, but in any case, it was a very good pitch. I was sitting there the whole time listening to him, agreeing with everything he said, but at the end I was slightly lost. I mean, sure, it'd be great to pair all these kids up with Harvard, but aren't there universities with research and whatnot near their homes, at least comparatively? I mean, there are opportunities, if people are just willing to ask, right? What exactly is he trying to set up.
The answer is, of course, a point that was reiterated so often during the last 4 years of my life that it made me nauseous by the end of it. And yet, looking back, I can't see how it could have been overemphasized, it's so humongous. It's TJ. Partly the classes, even the less than stellar ones, partly the students, and partly just the place. How many college professors would honestly just hire high school students who show up at their office asking for a chance to do research. Don't get me wrong, it's possible, and there are definitely people who do it. But those kids have to work a lot harder to prove themselves. TJ, both by reputation and by actual education, gave us this unerring ability to just get research from the nearby universities.
It's not just that of course. Through math team and the satellites, we picked up so much stuff we just take for granted. Of course, there's a lot more, and the absolute attitude is rather useless, but it's interesting to think about once in a while. And the stuff I learned shows up so often, despite explicitly being taught as "contest math". It's helped a ton with research, from random generating functions manipulations on Boltzmann Distribution Functions to predicting folding of large DNA networks by analyzing the adjacency matrix of interactions between basepairs.
I guess all I'm trying to say is that I can't even begin to express how much I loved everything about high school. Not in a depressing, I wish I were still there kind of way. I don't like getting emotional, so I take a great deal of effort to remain emotionally passive. There are great days to come, but it's worthwhile to keep the past in mind.
Anyway, you guys made TJ what it was for me, and continue to make it so. I just wanted to thank you for that.
~jnub
