How I Fail – Ian Goodfellow

Doing it successfully, defined as a measurable outcome, requires that you have a pretty accurate assessment of both the landscape, your abilities and the path to achieve the goal - with some factor considered for deviation from the charted path.

Depending on the scope of goal, the confidence interval on probability of success probably decreases exponentially with respect to time.

I know a person who went to a comparable institution in my country, who was considered something of a prodigy by his peers (and me) both before being selected and after joining the institution, and who struggled a lot with his academic responsibilities. In fact, I know a few of them. One of them had to drop out of the institution after repeatedly trying to finish his academic programme, and after two years of extensions.

People struggle with things, in general. Everybody has their struggles, everybody has their demons. Even "superhumans". What we should be aiming for is not the lack of struggles — for that is merely the absence of effort — but perseverance in the face of it and growth from going through it.

What I'm saying is that, in my experience, the belief doesn't hold up. If it were possible to reliably identify "academic superhumans" and concentrate them in one place, we'd have absolutely indisputable evidence of it. The fact that we don't suggests that perhaps your beliefs about how Stanford's admission practices correlate with quality of graduates may be mistaken.

They also know how to present their answers well, and I think teachers subconsciously give them more credit when they're not exactly right. As a funny anecdote, once I let a top copy my homework because he had just come home from a family emergency. He actually got a higher score on that homework than I did, despite the content of our answers being the same.

I went to the college with the highest number of state school students. After participating in outreach events to get more people from a variety of backgrounds to apply to Cambridge I honestly think the biggest bottleneck is people from state schools not applying. They hear all the stories about strange interviews or being surrounding by posh people they have nothing in common with and just don't bother.

I was the only person in my (rather large) school year to get into Cambridge, and only a couple of people applied. I was told all sorts of strange things about the application process which turned out not to be true. I imagine it must be far easier to apply if you go to a school where almost everyone does and the staff are well versed in what to get ready.