Hardcore
Thoughts prompted by iampied's recent (friendslocked) post...
The way to be your best, to be An Awesome Person (TM), is not to go for the most hardcore discipline or the most overloaded schedule or the most difficult subspecialty.
The way is to find the path that calls to you, the one that will allow you to become a hardcore expert, and follow it, no matter if other people look up to a physics major more than a poli-sci major or a lab technician more than a construction worker. Follow that path, put in your ten thousand hours or whatever it takes, and you will become a hardcore practitioner of whatever your discipline is (gradually over time, not all of a sudden like leveling up).
Just because I want to learn to make cells dance to my tune, instead of computers, does not make me an inferior human being. I can be as good at biology as half my friends are at programming. I would be utterly lost if you asked me to jump in and fix a significant problem with linerva.mit.edu; they would be just as lost if you asked them to perform and troubleshoot a 3A assembly or design an oriC plasmid. It may happen that they have some advantage in daily life because they can fix their personal computers and make them jump through fancier hoops. I can ask them for help, or I can ask the Internet, and more importantly, I can get to the point where I know how to figure out how to solve my problems. That's good enough for me.
The way to be your best, to be An Awesome Person (TM), is not to go for the most hardcore discipline or the most overloaded schedule or the most difficult subspecialty.
The way is to find the path that calls to you, the one that will allow you to become a hardcore expert, and follow it, no matter if other people look up to a physics major more than a poli-sci major or a lab technician more than a construction worker. Follow that path, put in your ten thousand hours or whatever it takes, and you will become a hardcore practitioner of whatever your discipline is (gradually over time, not all of a sudden like leveling up).
Just because I want to learn to make cells dance to my tune, instead of computers, does not make me an inferior human being. I can be as good at biology as half my friends are at programming. I would be utterly lost if you asked me to jump in and fix a significant problem with linerva.mit.edu; they would be just as lost if you asked them to perform and troubleshoot a 3A assembly or design an oriC plasmid. It may happen that they have some advantage in daily life because they can fix their personal computers and make them jump through fancier hoops. I can ask them for help, or I can ask the Internet, and more importantly, I can get to the point where I know how to figure out how to solve my problems. That's good enough for me.