A major blow to my ability to concentrate on my studies came when my grandmother passed away.
I was taking Stephen Cook’s course on Computational Complexity and Computability at the time. In high school, when I was studying the exact same topics covered by the course, my father had called them “worthless” and had told me that if I didn’t stop “wasting my time” on them then I would never get into graduate school. And when I had defended myself by telling him that Gödel’s theorems and the P vs. NP problem were among some of the most important ideas in computer science, he screamed at me, “Then why haven’t I heard of them?” (The answer is obvious — but I held my tongue.) During my undergraduate years, however, my classmates and the upper year students were in agreement that a course on computational complexity theory was something one had to take if one wanted to enter graduate school in computer science.
This upset me in several ways. First, it was yet another instance of my parents having prevented me from studying ahead. Second, nobody seemed to care about whether the contents of the course were interesting or not; everyone spoke only in terms of whether it was needed for graduate school. This accentuated my belief that I was in the wrong environment. Third, I felt terrible about the fact that I was in a class taught by Stephen Cook himself, who of course is one of the big names in the field, but was unprepared to ask him any really intelligent questions. I felt that I would have been, if only my studies had not been continually disrupted by my parents. All of these things had already made me very bitter and concentration quite difficult.
The final straw came when my grandmother became very ill during that term, and passed away just days before a major test in that class. I asked Prof. Cook before the test not to count it towards my final grade, and he agreed. But I wrote it anyway, and because I had been studying ahead, I actually obtained a perfect score on it. The next test, however, I failed miserably. I went back to Prof. Cook and asked if I could drop this test instead of the previous one. He answered in the negative, which was quite reasonable, of course — he couldn’t very well allow students to choose which tests to drop after the fact. So not only did I drop a perfect test and end up lowering my final grade considerably, my only interaction with one of the major researchers in the field had been to haggle about marks. And, my grandmother had passed away. I couldn’t touch computational complexity for several years afterwards, and the topic still makes me somewhat depressed.
– davinci
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