Amy’s an only child, right? Has it ever been mentioned whether her mother is widowed or divorced? Amy doesn’t seem to have a father in the picture, but she’s never commiserated with Sheldon over losing one, or Howard over being left by one. Is it possible she is illegitimate, and he mother’s crazy obsession over her virginity comes from a “Been there” place?
Amy went to Harvard. Leonard went to Princeton. Howard went to MIT, and it sounds through an oblique reference the Raj may have gone there too, possibly after a college in India. Where did Sheldon go? He went to college when he was 12, so it’s possible that he went somewhere near home for his undergrad work, but his grad work was probably as some place very prestigious. Has it ever been mentioned? Bernadette’s school must have been mentioned, since she was in school when she first appeared, but I can’t remember it. I don’t know her college either.
Amy seems to be an only child, and Howard definitely it. Raj has two sisters and IIRC four brothers. We don’t know where he is in the birth order, except Priya is younger. Bernadette has five siblings, all younger. Leonard has an older sister, married and in her 30s at the show’s outset. His brother (Michael) is younger. And taller. Sheldon has an older brother and a twin sister. Penny has a younger brother, and a sister who was old enough to have provided her with an 11-year-old nephew by season 2. We assume she’s older.
Semester abroad, almost certainly. Although the show has been really bad about languages. Only the nerd without the doctorate is multilingual. Where in reality, all the rest would have at least one additional language under their belt.
Sheldon also seems to know at least some Latin, Finnish, Chinese, and Klingon. If he studied (or taught) in Germany, he presumably knows German as well.
Sheldon got both his bachelor’s degree (and maybe his first doctorate) at the University of Texas. He got a second doctorate at the University of Heidelberg, although other websites say that he was a visiting professor there. Some websites claim that his first doctorate was at Caltech. The show isn’t entirely consistent about this.
We’re never told much about Amy’s life before the point that she entered the show. A lot of the background for her was obviously just made up by the writers on the spot whenever an episode required something to be known about her life. It wasn’t even decided that Amy was a neuroscientist until after her first appearance on the show. The show’s creators decided that they liked her performance in that first episode she was in (where she and Sheldon were set up on a date), so they decided to keep her on the show for a while. They needed to specify a job for her, so they just said, “Hey, Bialik has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, so let’s just make Amy a neuroscientist.”
Somehow, I don’t think a graduate program will accept that one. But they are fluent enough in it to hold secret conversations in front of the girls.
Howard just needed enough Russian to get by on the ISS. Sheldon and Leonard should probably be fluent-ish in German, and maybe French or Russian. As for Raj…as noted, he knows Hindi, even though every private conversation we’ve ever seen between Raj and his family has been in English, so that is the language spoken in their home.
Apparently, during the confrontation between Howard and Sheldon over the parking space, we see Sheldon’s doctorate from CalTech.
According to wiki, Howard knows at least 7 languages to some degree or another if you count Klingon. We’ve seen him speak English, Klingon, Russian, Mandarin, French, Arabic and Farsi. Plus ASL, Japanese and ASCII. His French is fluent, but people in-universe have commented on his poor Mandarin and Russian.
