Q: (Initially posted March 16, 2005) FROM STUDENT MEMBER HARRIET IN MA
I recently read an article about Albert Einstein that said he was not such a great student and was even expelled. The article also said he spent 7 years as a technical assistant in a patent office and produced much of his important work in his "spare time," not as part of his job. I'm wondering if any of the mentors ever had trouble in school or if they ever feel like their jobs do not really tap into their talents?

A: FROM MENTOR LESLIE WAITE IN CA
Hi Harriet!
What a great question!
I don't know that I would say that I had trouble in school, but I
definitely was not the straight A student that many people presume
you need to be to get a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and go on to be a
scientist. I failed courses in High School, college and graduate
school, and I have NEVER had straight A's, even when I tried really
hard to get them. And yet I am a good scientist! How did that happen?

Well, actually, it's not that uncommon to find that a lot of creative
people such as Einstein didn't do well in school. Much of this has to
do with learning styles. In most schools, even today when we really
should know better, teachers stand in front of a class and lecture
about a subject. Students listen and take notes, and are supposed to
learn things by this listening, and by reading text books. But there
are a lot of people out there (most in fact), who don't really learn
well this way. They learn better when there are demonstrations, or
when they can do hands-on work. In my opinion, scientists tend to be
more of this type of learner. We like to jump in and get our hands
dirty and ask questions about what is happening. We are very curious.
If you think about it, a scientist is so curious that they are asking
questions that no one knows the answer to yet! They have to answer
their own questions, because no one else can answer it for them.
That's pretty darned curious!

So what does all of this have to do with academic performance? Well,
it basically means that some people like Einstein who are clearly
very intelligent, aren't really able to display that intelligence in
the traditional learning format. It is also why it is not very wise
to judge people's intelligence based on classroom performance and
tests. Some very smart people get bored in classrooms, or just can't
learn well until they do things themselves, so their grades aren't
that great.

As for my job not really tapping into my talents- I have been very
fortunate to be able to get jobs that allowed me to do what I love
most- be curious about science! So I think my jobs have been very
good at tapping into my talents. But it's important to remember, that
being "a scientist" as an occupation is relatively new. Science used
to be something that wasn't considered productive or profitable, so
the only folks who really did science were either very wealthy (so
they didn't need to work), or did science in their "spare time" when
they weren't at work. It really has only been in the last 80 years or
so that science as a profession has emerged, and people have been
able to make a living doing scientific research. Even with this
shift, some fields, (Like Einstein's forte', physics) are still hard
to make a living in, since there are fewer possibilities to generate
something profitable or immediately useful, like a medicine.