Nobel Physics Prize Winner Koshiba: I graduated at the bottom of my class

October 12, 2002

One of this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Physics Masatoshi Koshiba descibed how he was at the bottom of his class and said  that academic records are not necessarily a determining factor in setting the course of one’s life. While such statements sound romantic, as one of his former classmates says later in the article, Dr. Koshiba was extremely bright, so that his poor performance might have had more to do with attitudes than with the true value of grades. In my opinion, Dr. Koshiba is probably the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, I bet he did quite well in Graduate School or he would have never received the resources required to do the high quality research that led to the prize. I always remember a friend of mine who worked for a very famous physicist who told me that the scary thing was not that his adviser was brilliant, but that he also worked 18 hour days.

This entry was posted on October 12, 2002 at 1:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized.

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