Interesting article from CNN . I had no idea this was being done in grade schools. I went to a women’s college, Wells, and I can definitely attest to the fact that I found myself definitely able to focus on my studies and start definining myself as a human being rather than worry about how I looked in class or would I sound too smart or too stupid…
However, there were a few geeks in my high school that definitely turned out to do some cool stuff that I wouldn’t have been exposed to if I were at a single sex high school. One perfect example is Dan Schwinn, who started a company called Shiva Corporation in the early 80’s that was eventually purchased by Intel. Now he’s into aerospace technologies, heading up Avidyne, a company he started with the dream of bringing high-tech instrumentation to moderate airplanes.
Dan was definitely our “bar” in high school as there was a group of us who were interested in math & science (oh my god, I just realized, I’ve been a geek all my life – eeeek!) and he was clearly the smartest among us and I also think the most self-confident, in those troubling days of high school social politics, as well. But it wasn’t all geek all the time. I think our poor mother’s drove us to ski about 6 or 7 days a week during the winter!
I went off to a small liberal arts women’s college and Dan went to MIT (oh, shock!) and I remember hearing that he was coming home during college breaks driving a Porsche because he was already doing some amazing stuff for some high-tech companies during the summers. In the late mid-80’s, I was working in the marketing dept for a magazine (already doing lots of programming related stuff). We were heavily invested in Macs as one of the first companies to do a lot of in-house computerized graphic work, and I remember that Dan’s company had the back cover ad of MacWeek (or something like that) every single issue! I’m talking about the 80’s. It was not the norm for 20 somethings to be doing big stuff like this, so it was pretty notable.