43 People Reveal What The Smart Kid From Their Class Achieved In Life

Went to Berkeley then MIT, our families have been good friends since I was in 5th grade. He’s trying to become an astronaut and I’d like to reach out again and go visit.

One was my best friend growing up, lived across the street from me (grew out of touch after graduation) but he went to a great college worked on Wall Street but then burnt out in his late 20s and struggled with mental health issues. Right now, he works a part-time job at a grocery store but that's about it.

My sister was one and she is now married and working at a daycare at the military base her husband is stationed at. She wanted to go to school to be a doctor when she was in high school then an english teacher and then kept changing her major until she ended up with a degree in early childhood education. She said it was a lot harder to keep up with the studies in college than in high school because of all the freedom she had.

Now I was actually valedictorian and I went to a private university in a different state for two years then both my parents almost died and I had a nasty incident with my old best friend and I just couldn’t take being there anymore. Transferred back home and now work with my father after getting my mechanical engineering degree. I want to be a professor but that’s most likely far into the future for me.

The valedictorian and salutatorian from my high school became a successful and respected doctor and a successful and respected lawyer/executive respectively. I know everyone loves hearing about falls from grace but these guys were hard workers who didn't let up in adulthood. Good for them, neither were jerks when my I last knew them.

It's a mixed bag, we had a bunch of really smart kids but we were all from a tiny extremely poor rural town in a rural county with only about 30k people. 1 high school for everyone, a group of us even were sent by Duke University to take the SAT in 7th grade. I got an award for my verbal SAT score, my math was low but considering I hadn't even had algebra yet that makes sense. One of the kids made like a 1200 out of the 1600 possible at the time. He burned out by our senior year, got busted for d***s after school and last I heard digs pools. On the other end, one is a doctor and very successful. I haven't kept up with most of them, the ones of us that moved away seem to have done the best. The poverty is really soul crushing at times and a lot of people got trapped by the cycle there. I ended up with a couple of master degrees(Computer Science and Pscyhology), tried to be an astronaut until I got sick and became disabled four years ago and had to give up that dream. I work for the gov as a DevSecOps engineer instead, remotely thankfully, as it makes managing my health a lot easier.

Smartest kid went to the air force academy and recently retired. he was flying f-35s at the end of his career, pretty bad a*s. probably making bank as an airline pilot now.

Our valedictorian went to school for mathematics and ended up switching majors to music. Now she is an opera singer. Our salutatorian went to school for excercise science and now does makeup tutorials and hosts sourdough workshops.

I was valedictorian of my class and got kicked out of my home the morning after graduating, at age 17. My parents were beginning a nasty divorce, and there was a lot of collateral damage including letting the family house get foreclosed. I still got to be the first person in my family to get a bachelors degree from the local uni. It hasn’t helped as much financially as I had hoped, but I’ve built a stable loving family of my own and that makes me very happy.

He went to Harvard and owns his own aerospace company. From a town of 8k population. He's a bad a*s.

CIA recruited out of College, then moved on to corporate recruiting. Now head of executive recruiting at Capital One and works in NYC. Prob a power player.

Was k****d in a freak accident two years after we graduated.

Absolutely tragic.

Earns 200k in the city while his wife gets the old in and out from the dumbest kid in the class(I'm not kidding).

Got her masters in honey/bee science and started working for the federal government, had 3 kids, started a side business because that wasn't enough work for her apparently lol. I adore her and she makes all the rest of us look like lazy bums.

I went to school, got my Masters in physics, had a child, and work a six-figure job in aviation. I managed to escape the opoid epidemic that blew through that little town when I moved from the south USA to Seattle, WA. A few of my classmates died, which for a small town seems like a lot.

I still look up some of my classmates. It makes me sad to see what happened to some of them. I've got survivors guilt, like I don't deserve such a good life.

Of the ones that I still know about..........2 are oncologists, 2 are college professors, 1 is a high school teacher, 1 is a dean at a private school. A couple more are bank managers, one is the mayor of our city and a couple more own their own small businesses. Looking back now on all of them, I'm not sure which was "the smartest kid", probably one of the college professors. She seemed to always do well without a lot of extra effort.

Top of my class was a trust fund kid.  He went to college.  Now he travels and is trying out new places to live. .

Triple majored in an Ivy League for undergrad, got a law degree from a top 10, is an international corporate lawyer pulling in multiple 7 figures a year, sits on the boards of a couple of NGOs on the side.

She's done well in life.

Don’t have a clue. I spent twelve years trying to get away from those people… I’ve never looked back.

They went to seminary and became a pastor in a small Midwestern town.

My friend Joe back in highschool memorized several different windows product keys and could recite them. He built Netflix-like streaming in a rich guys house one time. He had this server box filled with like 2.5TB of pirated movies and TV shows he’d been downloading and ripping from DVDs for years. He created a slick program to browse the movies and even had it assigned to TVs and wall-mounted tablets throughout the house, long before touch screens were a cheap commodity. It was seriously impressive, and he was a g*****n genius for coming up with it.

He eventually went into the marines and dropped out of boot camp after having a panic attack caused by a nurse putting amphetamine puffers up everyone’s noses. After that he got into d***s. Now he’s serving like 20+ years for d**g and s****l a*****t charges.