Reply to Tell High School Students to Stop Contacting Professors

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[quote=Anonymous]OP here.  Thanks for all the supportive and commiserating comments.  Here are a few anecdotes for context.

[quote=Anonymous]  OP's privilege is showing.  As well as his self-importance as a mediocre White man!  :lol:  :lol: [/quote]

Suzanna, is that you?  https://cssh.northeastern.edu/faculty/suzanna-walters/

Seriously, I don't know why you assume I'm a privileged, white, male, or mediocre.  I was born outside the U.S., my father did not attend college, and my mother did not attend high school.  Only half my colleagues are American, with many Indian and Chinese.  We all just studied math and found lucrative applications in my STEM field.

It takes little time for me to delete emails.  But high school students are wasting their own time.  I sometimes just tell them to study math.  These are not even applicants!  They are just random high school students, or even college students or graduate students in other countries.   It is especially silly when they write that they liked one of my old papers, because they clearly lack the ability to read and appreciate the paper.  They just skimmed my webpage on advice of some counselor.  These students don't know anything about my field, except that their parents think it is prestigious or profitable.

I sent one persistent Texas high school student a deceptively simple algebra problem (optimizing the dimensions of a box) to illustrate his lack of preparedness.  He quickly sent three replies:

1)  "Do I need to solve for length, width, and height, or can I just assume their values?"
2)  "Oh wait, I see.  Can the values be negative?"
3)  "The answer is length = width = height = 12 inches.  Right?"

I replied that his answer was wrong and that sending three emails demonstrated his "high maintenance" inability to work independently.  That is expected of a high school student, and that is why he needs to pay attention to his high school teachers.  Then I blocked him.

I don't know whether the research helps admissions.  GMU professor Bryan Caplan home-schooled his twin boys, who published in Journal of Mormon History and got full scholarships at Vanderbilt.  https://www.econlib.org/our-homeschooling-odyssey/

Newly hired administrators think they know more than long-term professors (who write research papers, textbooks, and teach).  So professors ignore them and do our work.  I have no current contact with admissions.

I paid for a teenage girl from my wife's social work to attend a two-week college summer course designed for high school students.  She promptly got pregnant and dropped out of high school.  But she later finished high school at night, enrolled in college, and became a teacher.  She also inspired her jealous dropout sister to finish high school too.   So, exposure to college can have long-lasting effects.

But most high school students do not need personalized instruction from professors.  One exception was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fefferman.  IIRC, he was only 13 when he applied to University of Maryland, and the math chairman took personal responsibility for him on campus.  Good call, because Fefferman won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics.   I don't have a lot of young Feffermans emailing me.[/quote]

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