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:

Child of Japanese and Korean immigrants Sho Yano

Earned PhD in biology at age 18 while attending medical school, from which he received an MD at age 21.

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Encyclopedia Americana staff writer Norbert Wiener

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

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Spice Merchant Dhirubhai Ambani

Amassed family fortune of more than $60 billion, sufficient for his son, Mukesh, to build a 27-story private home in Mumbai.

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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.

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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