goal: mål premed (pre-med) students: for at læse medicin skal man ofte tage forkurser i visse fag. rigorous: strengt med høje krav percentile: promille shatter: ødelægge be clueless: stå på bar bund deprivation: tab, at blive forbigået coined: skabt quiz: udspørge air corps: luftstyrke, luftvåben promote: forfremme people of ability: dygtige ansatte enlisted men: menige soldater
to do something easier because I can’t take the heat.’ For a while, that is the only way I was looking at it, like I have completely failed. This has been my goal and I can’t do it.” And it shouldn’t have mattered how Sacks did in organic chemistry, should it? She never wanted to be an organic chemist. It was just a course. Lots of people find organic chemistry impossible. It’s not uncommon for premed students to take organic chemistry over the summer at another college just to give themselves a full semester of practice. What’s more, Sacks was taking organic chemistry at an extraordinarily competitive and academically rigorous university. If you were to rank all the students in the world who are taking organic chemistry, Sacks would probably be in the 99th percentile. But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country – and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even though she isn’t stupid at all. “Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner.”
2 Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called “relative deprivation,” a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how Mack soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts. But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He quizzed both soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps. On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one 36
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