“Diligence without intelligence is tragedy, not success.”

“I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. … What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands I think and hope is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.”

“Education wouldn’t stop you from passing over opportunities repeatedly. You can be educated and still be poor. It’s only your ‘true intelligence’ that would make you face one single cause until you succeed. You have no idea of what’s gonna happen next, so you gotta open your eyes wide to see. Life is all about ‘improvisation’ and not those sacred certificates.”

“From kindergarten to the valedictory address, schools grade, rank, and label their best performers. The top high school student wins the first major life contest, a competition in which most members of society participate. Following high school, victors enter subsequent contests at an advantage. The race is never restarted.”

“To be number one is to be publicly labeled a winner in the system that counts – a system of advancement through personal merit and effort in rugged competition. Labels of success – Rhodes scholar, Nobel laureate, Heisman Trophy winner – follow a person through life and define him or her to the public. One such label, valedictorian, marks academic winners. Schools in the United States have at least one common belief: high academic achievement is a good thing.”

“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.”

“For academically talented women, in contrast, school success does not guarantee occupational success. Even the best female college students need people who will support them, encourage them, and – most important—who will connect them to opportunities.”

“Outstanding students of color arrived on campus without the web of white middle-class family and school structures that provided Anglo students with practical knowledge in such areas as college choice strategies and career planning.”

“College bonds weakened for students of who lived off campus, took outside employment, and maintained active family commitments. Unskilled in navigating the university, these students were unlikely to enter the personal networks where insiders traded the practical information they desperately needed.”

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

“Male valedictorians attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. Only one woman chose an Ivy League university-Cornell.”

“Women—and only women—lowered their intellectual self-esteem between high school graduation and sophomore year of college.”

“One of the problems with having time to read all that you want is that your interests become so eclectic it’s hard to focus.”

“As valedictorians matured from high school they began to change their views of success from stereotypical ideals such as material wealth or emulating their parents’ lifestyle to an idea created on their own. They now sought balance between money, career and family as opposed to, say, only wealth. Academically and careerwise most of them were traditionally successful.”

“Are valedictorians successful a decade and a half after high school? Yes is the simple answer to this straightforward question…Yet the answer becomes infinitely less simple when we examine what society and the valedictorians themselves mean by “success.”