萨尔曼·可汗的故事：探索高校选项

when I was seven years old I saw my uncle doing his homework he was a he was a student at the University of New Orleans studying to be an engineer and I asked him what this homework was he said it was calculus I said well what do you need that for he said oh I'm starting to be an engineer and I and I remember this conversation vividly he remembers none of it III then asked him well what does an engineer do and he says well Engineers bills things anything from cars to planes to boats to computers and you know whatever else I said well that's what I love doing I want to be an engineer and it just got into my head that you know that that's what I should do and he immediately said well if you want to be an engineer you should go to MIT and then I remember literally saying well then I will go to MIT not knowing what MIT was where it was what it stood for anything but it was just in the back of my mind and then by the time I got to high school it was still there and at this point I knew that it was this it was a good engineering school up in Massachusetts Institute of Technology but then the more that I asked her Anna does well you know this this is going to be a pretty competitive thing but I you know I did buckle down more with my studies but then my junior year when I was ready and I sat down with my guidance counselor and he said where are you going to apply I said I'm gonna apply to MIT and he said where else are you going to apply and I said no I think I'm just going to apply to MIT and my guidance counselor said well do you realize that no one from our high school has ever gotten into MIT that there's about five people in our state I was in Louisiana who get in every year maybe you should you know you have a shot but maybe you should apply in a few other places and at first I was a little dismissive I don't know if I don't get in I'll just wait a year and I apply again and he's like no no you really should apply to more to more places and so my process was pretty imperfect I I said okay well let's see locally I grew up in New Orleans there's Tulane very good school in New Orleans let me apply there I my sister was at Brown another excellent school I said let me apply there that's where my sister is and then several of the really good students from my high school the last several years had gone to Rice in Houston which also was a very good engineering school and so I said well I'll apply to Rice as well and you know lucky for me with this kind of ad hoc process just knowing who I knew it did work out you know obviously I got into MIT eventually you know I got into MIT and so that worked out but I think in hindsight I would have done it a little bit differently I probably would have broadened the number of applications I I put out there I probably would have put it's done more research on well what are all of it you know not just basing on what my uncle happened to tell me or what one over two friends happen to tell me I probably should have done more research on what are all of the top engineering schools I would have discovered that Stanford has an excellent engineering department Princeton has an excellent engineering department Cornell Georgia Tech I could go on and on and on so it probably make sense for me to apply to more schools and also to have more kind of diversity in terms of how hard it might have been to get into the different schools so you know if I was redoing it today I probably would apply to maybe maybe at least seven or seven or eight schools especially because you've gotten even more even more competitive now but yeah that's how I had thought about it at the time