David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

what the professor suggested. She retook
the course in the fall of her sophomore
year. But she barely did any better. She
got a low B. She was in shock. “I had
never gotten a B in an academic context
before,” she said. “I had never not
excelled. And I was taking the class for
the second time, this time as a
sophomore, and most of the kids in the
class were first-semester freshmen. It
was pretty disheartening.”
She had known when she was
accepted to Brown that it wasn’t going
to be like high school. It couldn’t be. She
wasn’t going to be the smartest girl in
the class anymore—and she’d accepted
that fact. “I figured, regardless of how
much I prepared, there would be kids