Aid to Evaluating Your Accomplishments

part of Career Guide for Engineers and Scientists
Compare yourself to these four ordinary people who were selected at random:

Corsican Lieutenant Napoleon Bonaparte

Conquered most of Europe and Egypt. Emancipated the Jews throughout Europe.

(more)

University Dropout Carl Friedrich Gauss

By the age of 21, he had constructed a regular 17-gon by ruler and compasses, the most major advance in this field since the time of the Greeks. Subsequently developed method of least squares, normal probability distribution, Fast Fourier Transform, and a non-Euclidean geometry.

(more)

Child of 16-year-old single mother LeBron James

Three-time National Basketball Association most-valuable player. On track to earn $1 billion prior to age 35.

(more)

Science Fiction Author L. Ron Hubbard

Created the religion of Scientology in 1950. 1998 membership: more than one million.

(more)

Programmed by Eve Astrid Andersson and Philip Greenspun back in the mid-1990s. If you're a nerd, you might find the source code useful.

Original Inspiration: How to Make Yourself Miserable, by Dan Greenburg


philg@mit.edu