A Quote by Rodney Brooks

I grew up in Adelaide, Australia. No one in my family had finished high school, and I was smart at mathematics, so I became an academic and got my Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. I didn't set out to be a businessperson.
My high school, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, showed me that anything is possible and that you're never too young to think big. At 15, I worked as a computer programmer at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab. After graduating, I attended Stanford for a degree in economics and computer science.
I'm very much half-American - my mom is American. I grew up in Australia until I was 16, then I finished high school over here because I got into this performing arts high school.
I’m very much half-American - my mom is American. I grew up in Australia until I was 16 then I finished high school over here because I got into this performing arts high school.
When I got out of the military, I finished up my education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and I had some mentors who said, 'You got what it takes. You should consider going to graduate school, getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience.' I didn't think I had what it took until somebody who had a Ph.D. told me I had what it takes.
I grew up as an only child of two parents who had dropped out of high school. They had enormous respect for education and encouraged me as a child when I had strong interests in both math and science, but we really didn't have much by way of educational role modeling in our family.
My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.
When I started I had no knowledge of films whatsoever. I was an engineering major at Stanford. And I found out as a senior that they had two film critics on the Stanford Daily, and they got free passes to all the theaters in Palo Alto. So I thought, I'll do that, and I became a film critic. And then I became interested in films. But I had no time to study anything in that area because I was a senior, just finishing up as engineering.
Only in high school when I began programming computers, did I become interested in tech and start-ups, which led me to attend Stanford and major in Computer Science.
When I got into Stanford in high school, I had some friends from school who told me that I just got in because I was black and whatnot.
Education in our family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre ... In this family of accomplished scholars, I was to become the academic black sheep. I performed adequately at high school, but in comparison to my older brother, who set the record for the highest cumulative average for our high school, my performance was decidedly mediocre.
In high school, I had fun in my academic clubs, watching movies with my girlfriends, learning Latin, having long, protracted, unrequited crushes on older guys who didn’t know me, and yes, hanging out with my family. I liked hanging out with my family! Later, when you’re grown up, you realize you never get to hang out with your family. You pretty much have only eighteen years to spend with them full time, and that’s it.
When I graduated from high school, I had artistic and academic scholarships, and I was trying to figure out what to do. I decided to audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Juilliard and the National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney, Australia.
Mathematics is often defined as the science of space and number . . . it was not until the recent resonance of computers and mathematics that a more apt definition became fully evident: mathematics is the science of patterns.
Growing up, I was always in my high school musicals and everything, but I kind of stopped doing all that when I finished school and acting became my main priority.
I majored in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley and worked as a software developer for a couple of years. Then I taught high school computer science for over a decade and a half in Oakland, California.
I grew up in an upper-middle-class town with a population around 12,000. My high school held around a thousand kids. All smart. We had a strict dress code. If you wore blue jeans to school, they sent you home.
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