Troian Bellisario Quotes

I have never gotten a B in my life. I would honestly be mortified if I got a B. I'm so academically driven.

I don't make a lot of mistakes, honestly. I'm an A-student, I'm an Ivy Leaguer. I need those things.

People who go to Oxford and Cambridge are often unproductive. What am I saying? This is nonsense. No, sometimes they get so competitive that, unless they're going to be Pulitzer prize-winning, they can't get off their backside.

Duke is in extremely competitive environment. In my high school, I think I got one B my whole four years. I was used to being the smartest kid in every class I was in, and then I went to Duke and suddenly I was the dumbest kid in every class. Everybody there is up to something.

My parents had very high expectations. They expected me to get straight A's from the time I was in kindergarten.

For exams, I swotted so hard because I couldn't bear the thought of not coming first.

I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.

My parents don't press it but, you know, they're into good grades.

It wasn't just OK to achieve in my family - it was expected.

Colleges will try to get the good students. That's the way to go. When I chaired my department of Materials Engineering at the Technion in 1990, we started a program for which we set the bar very high. It was the highest at the Technion, above electrical engineering and medicine.

The truth is many of us have been socialized to think that if we are not the very best, if we are not at the top 1 percent of whatever it is we do, then we are not good enough. To reinforce this already pervasive mental model, society has established a competitive hierarchy for just about everything.

I went to Columbia University because I knew I wanted to go to a school that was academically rigorous. I prided myself on getting good grades, but I also hated it.

If you're last in your class at Harvard, it doesn't feel like you're a good student, even though you really are. It's not smart for everyone to want to go to a great school.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

If I came home with a grade of A, my father would say, 'There must have been a lot of dummies in that class.'

My parents were typical Asian parents, and they do, like all parents, want their children to be successful. They really encouraged my brother and I to study math and science, and that's what we did as kids.

You know I went to the Hunt Schools, a boarding school in Princeton, and I've heard so many Rhodes scholars have gone to the Ivys.

Millions of people would give literally anything to get their kids into a school like Harvard, and millions more simple admire it as another, brighter world.

I like the whole package to be good, It's a rarity that that happens, so I end up not working a lot.

Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.

I am never worried that I'm not gonna get my work done. I was the kid who got straight As and was a little too intense in school. Like, I am a perfectionist, and I am going to sit at the front of the class with my hand raised.

I was raised by a single mother, and she felt the Japanese education system, albeit wonderful, keeps you in a certain range. You have to be better than this level but below this level.

I have to study, study, and study because I have to learn everything. Everyone expects me to be an expert on everything.

Harvard is nerd rehab. You have to check yourself in. Those who seek a school filled with self-proclaimed 'nerds,' seek elsewhere. Dropping the H bomb may brand you as an intellectual or a Kennedy. But it will not give you much nerd cred. And that's a good thing.

Yale students want to impress you with what they're doing. Harvard students want to impress you with how cool they look while doing it.