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:

Viennese Pauper W. A. Mozart

Composed his first opera, La finta semplice, at the age of 12.

(more)

Tuberculosis Sufferer Niels Henrik Abel

Developed group theory, proved the binomial theorem, and did important work in quintic equations and elliptic functions prior to his death at age 26.

(more)

Encyclopedia Americana staff writer Norbert Wiener

Received Ph.D. from Harvard at age 18, subsequently founded field of communication science/cybernetics.

(more)

Former Community College Student Craig Venter

Developed shotgun gene sequencing technique and founded Celera Genomics, a private company that raced ahead of the government-funded Human Genome Project.

(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