(I’m flattered by the inclusion in the list but would fwiw describe myself as “hoping to accomplish great things eventually after much more hard work”, rather than “accomplished”.)
FWIW I went to the Australian National University, which is about as good as universities in Australia get. In Australia there’s way less stratification of students into different qualities of universities—university admissions are determined almost entirely by high school grades, and if you graduate in the top 10% of high school graduates (which I barely did) you can attend basically any university you want to. So it’s pretty different from eg America, where you have to do pretty well in high school to get into top universities. I believe that Europe is more like Australia in this regard.
I can support the last point for Germany at least. There’s relatively little stratification among universities. It’s mostly about which subject you want to study, with popular subjects like medicine requiring straight A’s at basically every university. However you can get into a STEM program at the top universities without being in the top-10% at highschool level.
(I’m flattered by the inclusion in the list but would fwiw describe myself as “hoping to accomplish great things eventually after much more hard work”, rather than “accomplished”.)
FWIW I went to the Australian National University, which is about as good as universities in Australia get. In Australia there’s way less stratification of students into different qualities of universities—university admissions are determined almost entirely by high school grades, and if you graduate in the top 10% of high school graduates (which I barely did) you can attend basically any university you want to. So it’s pretty different from eg America, where you have to do pretty well in high school to get into top universities. I believe that Europe is more like Australia in this regard.
I can support the last point for Germany at least. There’s relatively little stratification among universities. It’s mostly about which subject you want to study, with popular subjects like medicine requiring straight A’s at basically every university. However you can get into a STEM program at the top universities without being in the top-10% at highschool level.