Yet sometimes I was haunted. Would I have been happier, more emotionally adjusted, had I not skipped 3 grades? Did skipping rob me of 3 years of growing up? I thought back to Hong Kong International School, where I’d sat in a room full of administrators and told them why I wanted to leave 8th grade. I told them about social studies class, where we read the front-page articles from USA Today aloud, pausing to define such troublesome words as ‘distinct’ and ‘priority.’ And about science class, where we learned that Genesis, Native American creation myths, and the Big Bang theory were all equally true in their unique ways. And about my homeroom teacher, who wishing me to socialize, had banned me from reading books during free period and specifically from bringing math-related books to school. I told the administrators that I wanted to skip to 9th grade, in the more academically focused high school, and this I did. After the intoxication of my first skip, I didn’t ruminate about the 2nd or the 3rd. When my family returned to Pennsylvania the following year, I enrolled in 11th grade at Council Rock, sneakily counting my 9th-grade credits from Hong Kong as 10th-grade credits. The following year I absconded to a program for high school seniors at Clarkson University in upstate New York, and the following year, armed with college credits and a G.E.D., I came to Cornell.

This essay made me understand why american kids need college to get the education they should have gotten in high school, something that had always puzzled me.