The boards are just screaming for this thread, aren’t they? Well, here it is. When did you realize you weren’t as smart as you thought you were?
I imagine college is a big one. I can’t point to any one thing, but, in my case, just going from “Oh, only a few kids in high school care about the things I care about, much less are particularly knowledgeable about them” to being dropped in an environment where you say “Wow, there are tons of people here who are just like me (or superior, in the relevant ways)” was suitably deflating. Grad school is just the finishing touch on that transformation.
Hopefully I can come up with some suitably punchy, hubris-shavingly embarrassing anecdotes to post later for illustration. In the meanwhile, let’s hear yours.
I think that the remedial classes in 8th grade followed by my repetition of the same grade and dropping out in 9th probably sealed it for me.
I mentioned in the thread now garnering so much attention though that getting to university just really made me realize that I am really incapable of the things I have wanted to accomplish. I’m reasonably intelligent, but don’t have the same intuitive sense of grasping patterns and asking relevant questions that many of my classmates do.
Boundary Value Problems. The math course in engineering school that comes after Advanced Calculus. First and only class I came close to failing (still think I passed by the grace of God and the bell curve) It’s a good thing I didn’t want to be a electrical engineer, 'cause the next course, complex variables, would likely have killed me. Fortunately for Mechies, BVP was enough.
I think not 'til my second semester in grad school. I sailed through the first one, but man, the combination of reading Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon plus the Renaissance Drama seminar where I realized I had no clue how to do research was a killer.
Meeting my doctor for the first time. I like to think I am proficient in computers and electronics in general.
He asked me what I did and then started talking about electron theory and my opinion on magnetism. He sounded like he could be one of my teachers at tech school. It was a WTF? moment for me.
He was kind of an arrogant prick but he was light years ahead of me in intelligence.
I experienced my first real sense of failure in college. I would fail tests occassionally in high school, but I always figured I could have done better if I had just studied more.
But college, when I would study my little butt off and still fail exams, I realized sometimes my brain just isn’t powerful enough.
My worse class of all time was organic chemistry lab. The lecture was hellish but survivable. But the lab tested everything about me that I’m not good at. Following directions. Being focused under pressure. Not being clumsy and dropping test tubes. The only time I cheated in college was in this class. Once, we were supposed to synthesize benzoic acid, and I turned in ultra pure crystals courtesy of Sigma-Aldrich.
I don’t know how I managed to get out with a C. They should have flunked me because I was so awful.
When I took pre-calculus. I had taken advanced this, and accelerated that for years, but pre-calc was a monster. I got through it, with a decent grade, but lordy, it was hard! I had met my match and it was higher math.
Oh, yes, whenever I meet someone knowledgeable about my field despite working in an entirely different area, it blows the wind right out of my sails. I’m really impressed by anyone with what I suppose you would call a well-rounded breadth of knowledge, particularly because I don’t have that at all.
High school geometry stopped me cold. Everything before then had simply been a matter of try again and figure it out on the second try, but I seemed to have a total block about visualizing or something. Got a tutor and kept at it, but pretty much faked my way through.
Several posters seem to define smart as knowing stuff and/or being able to solve thought problems. By those criteria, I still think I’m a pretty smart guy.
As far as making my way in the real world, I’m a big dumbass. It was only a couple of years after leaving college that I noticed my “inferiors” were doing much better than I was.
Learning Fortran in graduate school. I thought I would just attend class, pay attention, and get a perfect score on every homework assignment and test. It didn’t exactly turnout that way. I did get an A… but it was much, much tougher than I thought it would be and there were many moments when other students got things quicker and better than I did.
This was the first of many moments when I found that I was not a genius in either computers or statistics.
Academically, it was when I took Biology in college – the one with a lab, that the pre-med students took – and actually TRIED to get a good grade, REALLY tried. Studied taxonomy out the wazoo. KPCOFGS. First time I’d ever really worked for a grade, and I finished with a high B.
In terms of life in general, it was when I started working in fast food at age 16. My co-workers weren’t book-smart, but man, they could work circles around me. I so tried to emulate them.
Right now, as a SAHM, I get my butt kicked regularly; every time some mama posts a problem and I offer a solution (a perky one at that, gah I’m so annoying), I find myself confronting the exact issue here and failing miserably.
I hate to say it, but when I was a kid I was an arrogant little SoB in exactly the way that the wankfest thread the OP references (given special projects because I found schoolwork too simple, psychologists coming in to school to perform tests on me, getting put into ‘gifted’ one-to-one tuition sessions, yadda yadda yadda).
Then I got my comeuppance.
The first time I got taken down a peg or two was when I got kicked out of Applied Statistics A-level, then a few months later got kicked out of Chemistry A-level. I really, really didn’t understand what the fuck was going on in either of those subjects at that degree of advancement.
Then I eventually met people who were clearly streets ahead of me in cognitive ability, academic achievement, and strategic and critical thinking yet maintained social ability. I knew a few people who I acknowledged were smarter than me, but I condescendingly dismissed them as dweebs and losers. As I got older I met people who were (in my imagination) laughing into their sleeves at my obvious stupidity, yet were able to make it in the real world without embarrassing themselves.
One reality check for me came here when I posted an OP along the lines of “Explain this DNA thing to me.” I mean, I knew what DNA was, knew it was in all our cells except red blood cells and blah blah blah, knew it’s comprised of four molecules and all that, but I didn’t understand how it WORKED. How does the cell get the information out of it? How does one cell know to be a liver call and one knows to be a brain cell even though they have the same instructions?
Well, a few posters posted some really nice, well though out explanations, and I simply did not understand them. They really did try, but it was as if they were explaining organic chemistry to a hamster. I just could not grasp what the hell they were saying. As far as I am concerned, the manner in which DNA information is turned into actual organisms is pure magic. It was as if I were reading instructions written in Russian.
Another was reading one of those Idiot’s books on Einstein. I completely understoof the physics (I already knew a lot of it) until they got to something aboput blackbody radiation and some sort of “Catastrophe” and how something about blackbody radiation threw the world of physics for a loop. I read that section ten times and still didn’t understand what blackbody radation is or what the catastrophe was. I figured maybe it was just badly written, so I looked it up in a few other places, and I still don’t get it.
I am sure someone could explain it to me eventually, but I sure as hell couldn’t figure it out myself.
When I went to college I failed miserably. It was then that, for the first time, I started to feel not so smart. Realizing that I might not be suited for higher education (or at least, that it wasn’t going to be easy for me) really freaked me out. I was always considered a “smart kid” in high school, even though I was a crappy student. But after a certain point, it seems that nobody cares what you’re capable of if you don’t do anything with that capability.
That might not have been you. I had the same experience. The first homework assignment I was asked to prove somehting, and I looked at my notes and saw nothing but several unrelated facts. Then I transferred out of the advanced class, and I couldn’t believe how easy it all was.
My first year of graduate school. Most of my colleagues were a lot younger than I was and they seemed to remember EVERY damn thing they’d ever read, every damn theory ever encountered, etc, etc. It was a tough year for me.