Interesting perspective. I've always thought of pedophilia as being just another orientation, not necessarily tied to sexual abuse. That'd be like assuming a straight male has perverted tendencies towards all women. Homosexuality was perhaps also treated with these kinds of unfair assumptions before becoming accepted by mainstream society. People have a narrow range of perceived normalcy, anything beyond which is seen as deviant, but that range is evolving constantly.
I always feel really bad for pedophiles, but one issue with comparing attitudes towards homosexuality and attitudes towards pedophilia is that the solution to the homosexuality issue was to stop trying to "cure" it and let homosexuals indulge their desires. I find it highly unlikely that that will ever be the desirable solution to the pedophilia problem.
Consider how difficult it would be for a homosexual person to just act straight for their entire life, even if they can openly acknowledge their true selves.
Right, the key difference is that children are below the age of consent. I was just comparing how both were given unfair negative stereotypes for having an orientation different from the norm.
I recommend the book "Worthless: The Young Person's Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major" by Aaron Clarey for a brutally honest, if exaggerated, take on higher education and employment.
I'm from a Chinese family. Many of my friends and I were raised with this mindset. They went off to attend elite colleges, but I couldn't stomach the endless hoop jumping and toxic achievement culture, so I just did my own thing and went off to my local state school. While I've had some ups and downs, my life experiences were unique and I prefer not to form regrets about the past.
Good to hear that engineering is less dependent on institutional prestige. As someone who doesn't attend a name-brand university, I hope to be evaluated more for my skills than for the school I went to.
Just find some way to get yourself into the "in network." That can be attending a prestigious university, but you can also get it from the right internships or hackathon connections.
I didn't attend a traditionally top-ranked university, but it turns out that the majority of my useful connections did.
It may make your first offer harder. Some companies are way more likely to put a booth at the career fair of MIT compared to Foo State. After that meh.. some people care about schools, many do not.
I would imagine that the social network one builds in college can help later on, too, if only for internal referrals. I would be interested to see what percentage of Google employees attended Stanford vs. other schools vs. started professionally programming without a college degree.
Growing up, it felt like I was raised with the sole purpose of attending an elite college. I took AP classes, did SAT prep, and signed up for all the right extracurriculars, but my heart was never in it, and I couldn't force myself through in the end.
I ended up getting rejected from all but my safeties when applying to colleges. It felt like I was dead inside; I'd go through my daily motions, but I basically lost my interest in living for a while.
A friend of mine is in a similar situation. When we talk about it I often find myself frustrated because I'm the complete opposite.
I was raised in a kind of hippie-environment where I could do what I wanted as long as I got acceptable grades and didn't get into trouble. While perhaps as a result me and my siblings are not the most ambitious of people (at least not conventionally so), I can say that I've had a very happy and even successful life so far. Definitely less stressful than that of many of my friends who were raised to be ambitious (and then weren't able to 'satisfy' this ambition).
Could you tell me more about what you did or what happened to you since that 'for a while' period that you describe? I have no desire to prescribe to my friend what he should do, but I'm kind of expecting a personal crisis of sorts in the near future as he seems to be able to only barely managing the ambitious environment he's in and the anxiety-filled, high-pressure life he's led so far. If/when he doesn't succeed, it might shatter his high expectations. I'd love to hear how others dealt with similar situations.
Sure, I'll share. After my rejections, I kind of fell apart during senior year of high school. I was extremely depressed and ended up almost failing all of my classes. In the end, I barely made it to graduation and was more relieved than happy about finishing.
Post-graduation, I went straight to college and tried to put the past behind me. I started off pretty strong, but it was clear that I still lacked maturity, and my grades took a nosedive during my second semester.
I ended up being disqualified from my scholarships, so I left school for a year to figure things out. I worked full-time and took courses at community college to keep myself busy. It took a lot of effort and introspection, but I finally transferred back to college and started working on my computer science degree.
Now I'm doing much better, having grown a lot as a person. I've also landed two internships since then and gotten involved with plenty of extracurriculars and social activities on the side. My path wasn't as smooth as it could've been, but I don't regret much about my experiences. Failing at a young age taught me to shrug off shortcomings and made me a stronger person for the future.
