Gifted program student here, I think it was sometime in elementary school that they took me out of one class for some kind of testing. I remember a few parts of it, such as some trivia type questions, some shape puzzles and spatial testing things, general knowledge questions (What continent is Chile on? I guessed Asia, as I never really paid much attention to country borders; I preferred relief maps.) After that, the gifted program started.
I don't remember much of it from elementary school, except I thought the teacher for the class was pretty:$; I also remember that I was invited to her wedding a few months or years later. Other than that, I only remember a small classroom, with maybe 10 other students.
It was also just nice to get away from the regular class; I didn't really know how to fit in with people my own age. Adults made a lot more sense to me, and I could talk to them without confusing them, as happened to often with kids my own age. Just dealing with the whole "friendly ribbing" thing, sarcasm, and so on from peers - I just didn't get it. Like if someone says, "you're such an asshole," there is vocal inflection present to indicate that it is not serious. I didn't get that. I figured that if you called someone an asshole, you didn't like that person, and that was it. Sarcasm was simply lost on me until sometime in my mid teens. Social interaction was an activity for which there was no manual - only constant torment for not possessing an innate understanding of it.
Anyway, most of middle school and high school was spent beating up, killing, and burying any self-esteem or sense of self-worth I had, and I really never hoped for anything good for myself in the future, as I never saw it as a possibility that things would ever improve. Thus college wasn't much of a priority for me, as the last thing I wanted was to endure years of MORE torment at yet another school.
</emo, /wrists, etc>
Twas a miserable time, at any rate.
I did end up going to a community college for 2 years for something I ended up not liking, so that was mostly a waste. About 2-3 more years, I worked a temp job and then retail. Finally, I went to Penn State for mechanical engineering technology.
Now I've got a job at a small LED sign company, despite getting an interview with Sandia National Laboratories. Honestly, the idea of moving to New Mexico was rather scary, as I've almost never left Pennsylvania. It was too big of a change I guess. So, here I am. It's still an entertaining job that doesn't feel like work (I stay late some days just because it's fun), it pays the bills......but it still isn't quite where I might have once hoped to be.
Yeah well, it's what I've usually done: Low-risk decisions, and go with what's easy. I can't say it's "regret" that I feel though. I'm the one who made the decisions, and I live with the results; if I wanted something different, I'd change the pattern of decisions. "Good enough" is good enough.
(In the interests of "brevity," some details are missing from this, but I don't especially feel like typing it all out, nor would anyone read it anyway. Missing detail sampler: I might have liked to go into particle physics instead, maybe try for a Ph.D. or something, and work with nuclear fusion reactors. Maybe in a parallel universe or somewhere like that....but not this one.)
(Also, it's surprising how large of a post can result from a relatively short amount of typing; it's also surprising how very very little of a full thought is expressed even in a large block of text.)
Facebook
Twitter