Elif Batuman Quotes

I immigrated to the United States in 2001 for college.

The best escalator to opportunity in America is education.

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.

I like school very much, and I'll go to college if my career slows down. But kids go to college to be where I am today. Not to put college down, but for me, it would be digressing.

I was born and raised in California and benefited from California's excellent public schools, from kindergarten through medical school.

My father emigrated from Lithuania to the United States at the age of 12. He received his higher education in New York City and graduated in 1914 from the New York University School of Dentistry. My mother came at the age of 14 from a part of Russia which, after the war, became Poland; she was only 19 when she was married to my father.

Going to college is neither necessary nor sufficient to be well-educated.

Education is a precondition to survival in America today.

I regret to this day that I never went to college. I feel I should have been a doctor.

I have a B.S. in Biology from MIT, an M.Sc. in Human Biology and a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Oxford University, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. I never intended for so many degrees, but I enjoyed getting them all.

I had an excellent Ivy League education, and it gave me a long view of things.

Nobody just leaves medical school, especially given it's fiercely competitive to get in. But I had a sister who was a doctor, another who was a pharmacist, a brother who was an engineer. So my parents already had sensible children who would be able to make an actual living, and I think they felt comfortable sacrificing their one strange child.

You have to stay in school. You have to. You have to go to college. You have to get your degree. Because that's the one thing people can't take away from you is your education. And it is worth the investment.

My first port of call was Los Angeles. That's where I laid my first foot on America.

What would be better, that people build big houses thinking that they'll make capital gains or that they send their children to medical school and they do research on curing diseases? When you put it that way, it seems obvious. There has developed a sense of personal worth that's tied to one's house.

My dad got a job as a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He teaches biology and genetics. My dad has been obsessed with science his whole life. Both my paternal grandparents were illiterate bamboo farmers, so he really worked his way up and then got a Ph.D., full ride and everything, from universities in America.

Whether you want to go into music, whether you want to be a lawyer, whether you want to be President of the United States, the bottom line for all of you is that you have got to get your education.

I entered Harvard Medical School knowing nothing of research.

Where I live, there are a lot of businesses owned by Ethiopians and Eritreans. They're the new immigrants, the new Greeks - what my people did. The next generation of these people will probably be college graduates. That's how it works, right there in front of your eyes.

Education is equally important in one's life.

If it weren't for my education, I truly wouldn't be as successful at my job as a model.

After graduation from high school, I attended the university entrance examination, and fortunately, I was accepted by the Department of Pharmacy and became a student at the Medical School of Peking University.

I love the women who are coming back to school and getting their degrees because they're so focused.

My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria.

For generations of Hong Kongers, the only means of upward mobility and the only way to meaningfully contribute to society have been to obtain a respectable university degree (preferably in business administration) and a professional accreditation (in finance, accounting, law or medicine).