She is currently a doctor, married, has a kid, and is doing quite well for herself.
Which class? we had different students depending on the subject.
I’m still here.
Kidding! How do you determine who the smartest kid was?
Valedictorian is a way, but plenty of valedictorians aren’t the smartest kid, just the smart one who had the motivation to become one.
Can’t even use SAT or ACT score to pick, because the smartest kid may not have cared enough to bother or try to do as well as they could.
Plus, there are so many different types of smart; test taking is far from the only one.
Wait 5 second, they will tell you.
I scored the highest tertiary entrance rank in my school without studying a day in my life and had my pick of any university course or career. I went to university, and excelled at exams, but because I had undiagnosed ADHD and had never learned time management, I couldn’t cope with assignments that couldn’t be thrown together at the last minute in my lunch break. I was academically excluded.
So there was that. Basically, my life has continued to look like some variation of that experience since then :P
This also happened to me. I dropped out of game art & design school. Now I’m doing art and animation for a game dev company. I took the scenic route, but I got here eventually!
I'm in this answer and I don't like it.
In my class/homeroom? I’m sitting on the couch. Just trying not to let life get me down. In my grade? Fuck if I know. I did know like the top 5 in my grade, of 600+ students, but I didn’t keep in touch once we went off to college. At least 2 went to Ivy League schools for undergrad. Don’t know about the other 3.
I got a job as a software engineer and I live in one of the major cities in the US pretty comfortably.
(I was high school valedictorian, objectively average in college, and am maybe the high end of average in my career. My high school set a pretty low bar.)
Works in open source charity driven software - he’s having a ball.
All of the very smart people I knew from my youth have destroyed or are in the process of destroying themselves with substance abuse.
OD’d
Brains that run faster than average are very cool and impressive to people who don’t have to live in them.
boredom and depression will get you, that’s why there’s the saying “ignorance is bliss”
A lot of people aren’t impressed. I’ve seen people who are ten steps ahead while everyone else thinks they are ten steps behind.
He worked as a chemical engineer until he was killed by police over non-existant drugs. None of the officers involved got into any trouble.
ACAB
I mean we had a few that were al up there. From what I recall Jamie dropped out and had a couple of kids, Mark still lives at home 'cause he’s got no job and Just plays guitar and smokes a lot of pot. Jay committed suicide. Brandon OD’d and died.
What the hell is going on??
Society doesn’t reward intelligence and drive, together or singly. Society rewards mediocrity (make boss look good, not yourself) and undercutting.
The cruelest dream - reality.
Chances thrown, nothing’s free
Longing for what used to be. Still, it’s hard
hard to see
Fragile lives
Should’ve known we’d never get far.
No idea, I moved away and moved on. Have a great life. Don’t care what the others are doing. Hope they’re well.
Honestly don’t know. In grade school we had a classmate who was always at the top of our entire batch. As expected she graduated as valedictorian. We all took the entrance exam for one of the coveted high schools and surprisingly she didn’t pass…and I got in lol. She kinda faded away after that. She’s probably fine though, just didn’t meet expectations going into high school.
Damn. That’s kinda why I’m not a fan of exams. People have test anxiety. In a lot of my math classes, some of the smartest people in there can’t take tests for shit because of so much test anxiety they have. This person probably had the qualifications to get in but unfortunate that the exam was too big of a hurdle.
I gradually, but absolutely fell the fuck apart after middle/high school. I’m working with a therapist and job coaches so I can get my shit reasonably back together. As it turns out, Gifted kids are most likely just neurodivergent kids who would really like someone to see them as something other than test scores and probably are smiling through a bunch of unaddressed problems. I hope the other TAG kids from my year are doing way better.
Everyone left. There’s nothing the state can offer to keep the most productive people. Most ended up going to California.
The ones that returned became educators.
