For one, math was supposed to be hard. People say, "~Oooh calculus~" as if it's some scary monster. I would say, "What, calculus? I finished that in 10th grade." Well, calculus 1 and 2, at least. That was the highest they offered at my high school, so I took online math classes from the nearby university my last 2 years. Of course I aced all of those classes. What did you expect? Math was one of those things that just came easy to me. They kept saying, "Do the homework and study because that's the only way you're going to learn." I just wanted to tell them, "There are exceptions to that rule."
In 11th grade I tried to sign up for AP (Advanced Placement) physics. The prerequisite was honors physics, which I hadn't taken, so I talked to the teacher about it. He was against the idea, just because of the trouble that even previous honors physics students had in AP physics. One would have to work extremely hard to get through AP physics without having had previous physics experience. I said I'd work as hard as I needed to, and my parents and some other teachers said they thought I could do it, so I was allowed to take the class.
In the first few days, there were so many questions on previous topics. The stuff from last semester. That stuff we were supposed to already know. I definitely felt awkward not knowing anything. But I got up to speed pretty quickly. Eventually, it became clear that I understood the concepts pretty well. I started to become the person in the class that everyone (the other 8 students) expected to have the right answer all the time. They were all a year ahead of me, and they had all taken honors physics before, but I was ahead of them in math, taking calculus 3 at the time while they were only taking calculus 1 or 2. My math skills became obvious too when the teacher began looking at me to see if I thought his math work was correct. One time I was even asked to write out and explain some math concept on the board because even the teacher wasn't clear on it. Maybe my biggest moment in the class was on the final for the first semester. It was so long ago that I don't remember the exact numbers anymore, but after the final, the teacher went to the board and started writing some numbers. The average on the free response section (the other section we had all done together as a class) was something like 40%, 30% I think. I remember thinking that I thought I had done pretty well on it, when the teacher went on to write, "not counting Daniel's 45/45." Oh, I got perfect. I guess I did pretty well on it. Then I went on to get 5 (max score) on both sections of the AP exam. You didn't need to do that well to get a 5, like 70% would probably do, but it was still supposed to be really hard. And then of course I got 5's on the AP chemistry exam and AP calculus 1 and 2, and even US history, which I was a little surprised about. It's not that I was bad at history, it's just that I wasn't that good at it. You know, compared to how good I was at math and science. My standardized tests showed the math ability. 80 on the PSAT, 800 on the SAT, 36 on the ACT. All perfect. The other scores were not as good, by which I mean they weren't perfect. Something like 670 and 680 on the SAT reading and writing. 35 out of 36 overall on the ACT, which is great and all, but a girl in my year got a perfect 36. She was even someone I knew fairly well.
To be honest I always thought there were quite a few smart people that were graduating with me. Even though I wasn't a straight A student, my GPA was high enough that it could've been top of the class in other years. For my year, it was 10th. There were a lot of people who had different strengths than I had. I don't think they could've matched me in the math and science department... but they had their own strengths.
The thing was, I knew my strengths. I knew my abilities. I was heading off to a "tough" engineering college, but it was my specialty. Math and science. My parents came back from the parent orientation saying that they had previous high school valedictorians on the stage telling how they never had to study in high school and it was such a breeze... but this college, man, it made them work hard. It sounded like me, and they were worried that I would have trouble. I wasn't worried. I really knew my strengths. It was my ability: to just learn things. Know things. I don't know if I knew something most people didn't, or if my brain worked in some special way, or what. But I would say, study? Why would you do that? You don't just, just..., understand things?
You might say that I was cocky as my college days approached. I like to say that I was... confident. You see, it wasn't that I was arrogant. It wasn't that I was some egomaniac or something. If it were the case that everyone I met at college seemed to be smarter than me, it wasn't going to break my ego or anything. It would've been surprising, but I wasn't so closed-minded to think that I ought to be one of the smartest people in the world or something. So, with that mindset, I went ahead with full confidence, because even if I were to have grossly misjudged my abilities, I had a trump card. The trump card called effort, and I wasn't afraid to use it if necessary.
See, I had no worries about the academics. The thing that I was most anxious to know was the people I would be living with. I couldn't stop wondering, "Who are my roommates..?"
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