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In reply to the discussion: My high school counselor said I wasn't "college material". Well, guess who passed the CA bar exam? [View all]DFW
(54,410 posts)Yours is a story SO in need of telling to able people who have been told, "this is all you will ever amount to."
SEZ who?
First there was me. In college, I couldn't decide on a major at first, was told to go see a professor from the history department. He was snotty bastard who told me, "we are not running a school for tour guides!" Fine, so I breezed through a major in Spanish, taking courses covering material I had already read while living in Spain during part of high school. Wasted time, but it kept me out of Vietnam, and I got to pursue side courses I wanted to pursue (Anthropology, Russian, Swedish, Linguistics, etc.) with no pressure.
Then there was my older daughter, who was shy in high school here in Germany. The German system is a Darwinian structure that weeds out shy people and eliminates (rather than helps out) kids who might be capable, but aren't aggressive and self-promoting. They are told to pursue vocational schools. She had done one semester of high school in the USA, and did much better. She went to college in the USA, and shortly before graduation, asked me about an English word she had never heard before. What does the word "valedictorian" mean, and why do I have to give a speech? She never moved back to Germany.
My younger daughter was more ambitious, also did high school in the USA (just barely: Waimea on the Big Island), and was turned down by all major US colleges except George Washington in D.C. She went there, graduated magna in political science/public policy, earned pocket money on the side ($25 an hour!) translating documents for a German lawyer working out of Washington. He even offered her a job when she graduated, but she wanted to go to law school as well. Again, because the LSATs contained English words she had never run across before, she did not score well enough on them to earn the attention of the "top tier" law schools, and she ended up going to Pace Law in White Plains, NY. She graduated magna in 2010, passed the New York bar, got a job offer from the Frankfurt arm of a big British firm. was headhunted by a big New York firm two years later, and made partner at age 31, their youngest. She now dresses down interns sent over from the USA with JDs from Harvard and Yale who show up thinking they are hot shit due to their fancy degrees. She tells them, "your work is sloppy, your English sucks, your German is worse, your work ethic, too, since you always leave at 4:59 PM, and if you don't become more useful in a hurry, you might as well pack up and go home." They leave sometimes in tears, not understanding that their fancy little document isn't enough to impress people who are out there in the real world, and got to where they are the hard way, being told at every step that they just weren't good enough.
So don't EVER let someone tell you that you aren't good enough! Chances are at least 50-50 that they aren't really looking at you, but rather in a mirror, and just don't realize it.