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by tkahn6 5569 days ago
> A hard worker does work that he/she is assigned

Maybe. But a smart worker evaluates what's important and what's not. Formal education and learning are sometimes completely orthogonal to each other. You might be thinking "well, how do you know what's important?" and the answer is that it's a gamble and decisions like those are not for everyone. There is no virtue in simply doing what you're told and being passive in your own education.

1 comments

The OP claimed that he procured a reference that attested to his "hard-workingness". It's perfectly ok to be a smart worker, and I don't disagree with your point. My point of contention is with the abuse of the reference system - what value does the reference system have if you simply ask for (and receive) character attributes you do not possess?

So basically he was admitted on traditional merit, by misleading application reviewers.

Yeah I guess it depends how you define "hard work". Certainly spending hours reading math books and programming is some sort of work.