3,849 Quotes About Intelligence

For minority students, as for women and working-class white valedictorians, superior college grades did not lead smoothly to high-level satisfying work.

The stories of successful channels, stifling ruts, and missed paths all point to the same conclusion: the successful passage from school to postschool achievement requires an interpersonal process of increasing self-understanding, career socialization, and tacit knowledge.

Academically capable men and women almost never follow a single-minded interest from childhood into careers.

The happiest have found adult achievement arenas that do engage them, occasionally through the luck of good early choices, sometimes by leaving worn paths, and most often through exploring themselves and careers with the help of guides and sponsors.

Just as the stereotypes of the one-sided academic grind or the obsessed genius are myths for high school valedictorians, also false is the conception of academic achievers as troubled individuals effective only in school.

As a group, valedictorians have always led well-rounded, socially integrated, ‘normal’ lives.

Female valedictorians marry a little later and participate somewhat more heavily in paid work than women in their age group nationally.

In their early thirties, the most career-invested women and men in the Illinois Valedictorian Project are those who have found deep personal meaning in vocations. Those qualities and conditions that keep students centered on work are different than those that made them high school valedictorian.

To reach the head of the class, students needed to conform to the school system and work equally hard at all subjects.