Steven Chu School Quotations

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.

Occasionally, I would focus on a particular school project and become obsessed with, what seemed to my mother, to be trivial details instead of apportioning the time I spent on school work in a more efficient way.

Despite the importance of education in our family, my life was not completely centered around school work or recreational reading.

There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system.