Thus, after finishing high school, I started with high expectations and enthusiasm to study chemistry at the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Keeping with our family tradition of sending their children abroad for a couple of years, and aware of my interest in chemistry, I was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland when I was 11 years old, on the assumption that German was an important language for a prospective chemist to learn.
I was quite nerdy at school. I skipped a year and won a scholarship in chemistry.
I am a passionate reader, having been tutored very early by my mother. I avidly devoured all books on chemistry that I could find. Formal chemistry at school seemed boring by comparison, and my performance was routine. In contrast, I did spectacularly well in mathematics and sailed through classes and exams with ease.
Chemistry was always my weakest subject in high school and college.
My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set.
I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics.
In my schooling through high school, I excelled mainly in chemistry, physics and mathematics.
From age 16 on, I found school boring and failed A-level Physics at my first attempt. This was necessary for university entrance, and so I stayed an extra year to repeat it. This time, I did splendidly and was admitted to Sheffield University, my first choice because of their excellent Chemistry Department.
In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.
At Harvard I majored in chemistry with a strong inclination toward math.