How do we know...

guessing you've never taken a high level mathematics or physics course...

An IQ of 999? Holy fuck, do you have any idea how high that is? If you have an IQ of over 150 you are considered to have Genius level Intellect.

now that i think about it.. i shouldn't be happy..

That makes me feel really happy.

thanks man, I never understood why people thought what I did was wrong.

I see you failed statistics. Ever heard of an outlier?

My uncle didn't go to college, started his own business, and now makes more money than my engineer father, but that is a case of "man bites dog."
Let me tell you about another high school drop out I've heard about.
blog.thenewstribune.com/crime/2013/01/22/teen-felon-arrested-in-connection-with-gang-shooting-in-parkland/

Yeah....... There's a difference between being smart and being intelligent.

please state the difference?

Intelligence is ability. Smarts' is information, knowing things. There's a difference, though it's a common misconception.

they usually correlate.
usually

they usually tend to correlate. I've seen some people who aren't the smartest but work damn hard. On the contrary, I know a few people who don't work at all and pass AP classes with flying colors. Nothing is in black and white.

This really only applies to countries where you can have a normal future.
Come, try and live and grow up in Serbia.. No matter how good you are in school or bad you will be fucked completely either way. Going to any "ivy" league school as you people call them, is a pipe dream. Maybe if you have a perfect score you will have a chance and win the lottery and get a scholarship, the 4 or 5 of you will go on to have a future..
The rest of us will just have to make it with diplomas which don't count in any other country in the world unless you take some certification bullshit after which they will proceed not to give a shit about you.
So.. yeah.. have fun with your "future" nonsense, whatever that is.

Great, too bad this wasn't a conversation about that. When I wrote this comment, i had america in mind.

And you still agreed with me. You realized the importance of school and got your shit together. The part where you have to pay for extra years of college sucks though, bro.

Also, full ride scholarships

You're work isnt quite complete yet.

Community college is about as cheap as college comes. My family is low income so we get FAFSA tuition grants. Also I may decide on not going to a 4-year college after graduation. It all depends on how I feel during my 2nd year.

**lilRican rolled a random image posted in comment #330 at good luck trying to sleep now **

If you actually tried through high school you do realize how much easier it would've been to become a psychologist right?

No, I don't see. Offer empirical evidence.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE:

www.nationalmerit.org/
the entire system schools decide acceptance on.
If you do well in highschool, its not a matter of "Will I get accepted," it becomes "can I afford this Ivy league school."

The tuition at the college of my choice runs at about the same tuition as my high school. That said, you can earn scholarships while in community college.

so it just takes an extra few years of your live

regardless, if you still didn't care about school, chances are you wouldn't end up with a high paying job. School is important.

I feel that I need the extra time to decide what I want to do, do some self searching so to speak. Plus it's nice to spend more time in school, expand my mind and stuff. Also if I take state required classes at community college I won't have to take them at a 4 year college, I can just elect to take whichever classes I want and have a very open schedule.

School is important if you think having a high paying job is important. To put it simply, I have a rather zen outlook on life. I don't place my self-worth in how successful I am or how much money I will make. I place my self-worth in who I am, and I must say I'm happy with myself. As for a job, I would prefer to be self-employed.

I consider school important because I want to create. The greatest people throughout history were learned, and they improved the world because of it. I want to have a lasting impact, contribute to the wealth of humanities knowledge, and to someday be plagiarized in a college essay.

Does innovation really matter if the innovations made won't save our species? I want to go into the field of psychology. I might be able to make postulations and hypotheses and be able to prove them true after evaluation and testing, but in the end the human race will die out. We are a flawed species. Our time in the universe is limited.

Bro, thats not a fair argument. Everything dies and eventually the universe will be without life.

www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2009#comic

The events following my death don't affect me in anyway. When I get older I'm going to be an asshole to everyone so I can be remembered as such, so my dying thought can be "at least tears won't be shed over me doing this".

This is going back to what you said in comment #104.

Anecdotal evidence is completely valid

:O

On top of that, with modern society being so massively diverse, it's impossible for us to continue the "general education" for so long. We'll need to start educational specialization sooner in our youth's lives. There will be more and more information with just as much time to cover all of it, and we just won't be able to keep up.

Thus, teaching concepts and intellectual thinking is a better use of time than teaching them specific formulas. Formulas can be easily deducted or learned if a concept is mastered, the opposite is not true. No real life job will ever require knowledge of anything but concepts. Programming is a great example. You can show someone how to write a quicksort easily, but it's totally useless if they have no idea how to write anything else. Thus, most comp sci majors only have a couple classes that focus on programming itself, and the rest talk about concepts and theories.

isnt that what china does? says:"you show promise in math in 6th grade, you become scientist" or "you dont pay attention, you graduate school early to enter general workforce". which i dont agree with since i would have become a manual laborer at the end of 8th grade. become a certified welder at the end of 12th grade. and right now im in college double majoring in engineering and math plus a minor in computer science.

long story short, i prefer the way general education is instead of specializing early on.

Who said anything about becoming like China? How did you manage to turn my comment saying we should focus on making education better by learning to specialize in fields sooner in life and making sure we teach people how to learn and how to think rather than how to memorize things that we'll never need memorized... into me promoting obviously wrong practices like China does?

My point was that there is too much knowledge out there now. General education has worked thus far, and I never said it was BAD. I just said it's not feasible for it to continue on in it's current form for long. I've seen children (no smarter or more mature than I was at their age) do amazing things because of the resources they have at their fingertips. They learned what they wanted to do because they had the entire world in their computers to explore, and started specializing their education as much as they could for those fields. They aren't any more special or intelligent than the average kid to be honest other than being more motivated. The information age changes so much, but we seem blind to the fact that it might be able to change our system of education radically as well.

i compared what you are saying to what china is doing. they start their specialized schooling at 14 which arent mandatory. i then used myself as an example because at the age of 14 i had no idea what i wanted to do (which if my parents didnt have enough money i would get an entry level job), and i didnt find what i wanted to do after two years of college. im not saying you have the wrong idea but i cant agree with specializing children at a young age.

I'm just going off my experience, YMMV. But I knew I wanted to be a software engineer at aroung 15. At that time, most of my friends figured out what they wanted to do in life (realistically). And almost all of them have stuck to their guns about their fields. But I taught myself so much because it wasn't until my 3rd year of college that they finally start letting my pick classes associated with my major, and I still had to start at the introductory courses. Pretty much all of my know how had to be self taught because the general education system failed me completely (I got good grades, but no knowledge).

What kind of engineering? I was thinking of double majoring in mechanical and aerospace or just get a masters in mechanical and come back later for aerospace.

Industrial engineering. right now that is more of a back up degree if i cant find a job with math.

mechanical is rewarding if you are passionate about it. a lot of freshman come here for mechanical then drop out because they want an engineers pay without the work.

I'M SWEDISH GODDAMNIT