How Not to Begin Your Higher Education It really began in 10th grade, the second to last in Quebec, during which I was sent to a Swiss boarding school to clean up my act. It had a thick rule book, so it was not a good match for me. I came back to Montreal after just a few months, and went to Centenial Academy to prepare for my first round of matriculation exams, "the matrics". For those who are not familiar with them, they were exams that represented 100% of your grade and basically your entire school record. I had grown up hearing my mother talk about her matrics, and it was part of the general consciousness of the province. Fortunately, my matrics went very well, but it gave me a feeling of over-confidence that would nearly turn my life in an unfortunate direction. During my final year in high school, I had the idea of applying to universities outside the province to avoid two years of CEGEP (College d'Enseignement General Et Professionel). Back then, it was roughly equivalent to two more years of high school quality education, followed by three years in a university. I was not keen on having more high school experiences, nor of spending an extra year of my life being educated, so I applied to schools. The application deadlines for most schools had passed. That combined with my timidity limiting me to schools within an easy day's drive, reduced the number of schools to a handful, primarily in New York and Ontario. I recall that the University of Rochester had a nice foldout application in heavy paper. I took the SATs, uncommon in Montreal except for uniformed students from private schools, and did reasonably well. Instead of taking the achievment test in French, for which I'd have been a ringer, I took advanced math, for which I had five minutes of preparation (the square root of negative one is i). I scored 670 on that test, which put me at the 49th percentile. SATs were only part of the application, so I jumped into action and resurrected the chess club. But my SATs were good enough to get me in at almost all the schools