There are dozens of fantastic organizations that do incredible things for education - 826 Valencia, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Teach for America, just to name a few. But it feels like everyone is so caught up with bettering the schools in poorer neighbors that little attention is left towards accelerated students. Yet it's often these accelerated students who will ultimately make the biggest impact on the world.

During my time at the early college program I went to, I was surrounded by 400 other students who were equally as passionate as I am. And it was upsetting to see that one of the biggest problems among the student body was simply paying for tuition. Many of my friends took out massive loans to pay off their private school tuition, and many more who were never able to attend the early college program because of its steep costs.

Yes - paying for college tuition is obviously a widespread problem. But when we're talking about accelerated students who are highly likely to take leading roles in improving science, education, and society in ways we can't even predict, I think we need to funnel more resources into seeing their dreams take shape. It's not to say that I don't care about students who come from poorer backgrounds, because I do. And so does pretty much every non-profit organization that aids education. But when the vast majority of the world's leading thinkers and doers come from such a narrow margin of people, I think it's a shame that we're not providing them with more educational and monetary resources. From the non-profit perspective, these already smart students seemingly need help the least, when in fact they're in a position that deserves resources the most.

During my first week attending Simon's Rock, the Early College, I sat beside representatives from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They were curious about the mission of the college, but also on why and how the students ended up there. All of my peers and I would tell them a similar message: we went to college early because we felt educationally neglected in high school; not because we were rocket scientists or baby geniuses. Having a "good" educational system doesn't seem acceptable to me, because it's settling for mediocrity while not accounting for crucial edge cases. Highly intelligent individuals are being screwed over when placed in decent yet boring academic environment among not-so-motivated peers. It's an insanely high opportunity cost to leave America's brightest students behind in standard high schools. And as I mentioned earlier, transferring to a private school is rarely an option for the typical accelerated student. Many of my peers at Simon's Rock wouldn't have been able to come if it hadn't been for scholarships, including my first roommate. That scholarship money is seen as a way to help her fund her education when in reality, it's an investment in her ability to do amazing things for the world. While we're yet to see the extent of her contributions to the world, I'm pretty certain that we'll one day realize how incredibly efficient and effective her scholarship money was spent. The underlying problem, however, is much deeper. "Investing" into the education of accelerated students isn't particularly complex, but identifying worthy individuals is a non-trivial problem, because they don't even realize their own potential. There are plenty of smart and accelerated students in high school, but having them realize that there's an opportunity for more has been a a huge struggle for Simon's Rock. Truly smart individuals are humble and tend to underrate their own abilities. The parents also underrate their abilities, and I think this is partly because their parental attitude is what led to their child being able to excel in the first place. Many capable students don't ultimately go into early college because they don't think they're smart enough, and those who do often have trouble getting the necessary financial support to go: thus leaving them behind in half-assed "accelerated" high school programs. Pity. I suppose that it makes sense that most educational non-profits are focusing their energy on poor public schools: the problems are clear, many of the solutions are evident, and it's a cause that's easy to gather support for. Yet it's these smart and already accelerated students who are usually creating the solutions to these problems. Treating these accelerated students as "bonus points" in our pursuit to reform education simply doesn't make sense because they're the long-term solution to our world's problems. Hopefully one day, we'll see more and more early college programs forming that provide their students with theoretically infinite resources and support to help them achieve their goals and dreams.

A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to come up with business ideas. I basically said to look at the world with a critical eye, and to keep track of everything that seems to suck. I still maintain that philosophy, and I recently discovered something about my "passions" in life: Everything I aspire to do is directly related to something that I dislike. I hate education, and I always have. School has never been a fun place for me. In elementary school, I was bored out of my mind. My 5th grade teacher discouraged me from my entrepreneurial pursuits. High school was more about dealing with girl drama than it was about learning meaningful things. By having spent more than 80% of my life suffering through these traumatic experiences, I've become interested in something that I've forever dreaded. While I'm yet to do anything super innovative to help the world of education, my past project internshipIN.com was a start in that direction. I realized that most of my learning came from working at a company, and so I spent my limited free time on helping students find real world internships. More recently, I decided that I hated accounting, I hated finance, and I hated money (although I enjoy the idea of having it). Managing finances is the one thing I despise most in building a company, and nothing stresses me out more than thinking about money. It's the root of all evil, it causes people to kill, it leads to people going to jail (think Madoff), and yet it's the biggest driving force behind every person's life aspirations. So I built a startup, Indinero.com, around the idea of making money suck less for businesses. It's something I plan on dedicating my career to. One of my friends in the investment world recently asked me why I'm building Indinero. After all, why would any young college student want to work on a finance startup? I think about my life as doing two primary things: Minimizing my risk, and minimizing my dissatisfaction with the world. This is an odd way to think about things, because most people think about their life in the opposite way. But I've come to realize that minus the shitty things that happen in life, I'm an optimally happy person. If I can remove the things that crush my soul, I'd be a happier person, and the world would theoretically be a better place. What would you rather do: Make the world a better place, or prevent it from sucking as bad as it does? I'd pick the latter, because it embraces the fact that the world is far from its optimal state. As my friend Manu told me, "make sure you're creating a painkiller instead of a vitamin." As I write this article, I'm suffering from the worst cold I've had in years. I'd pay anything to make this go away, and no cold medication has worked. So thinking about life from my current unhappy perspective, I see the world as a crappy place to live, and I'd be 10X happier if I simply wasn't unhappy. What a seemingly simple idea! Because think about it: during the happiest moments of your life, you probably didn't have anything special or unique that made you happy. But in each and every one of these happiest moments, you lacked the things that would otherwise drive you mad. This past summer was the happiest time of my life. I lived on ramen (literally), I shared a tiny Berkeley home with my team members at Indinero, and I was at the peak of my happiness despite my having zero material assets and close to zero fulfillment in my career. But I didn't have the two things that stress me out most: 1) school and 2) money issues. Between being on summer break and having $35k in the bank (and a startup that creates software that helped cure my finance concerns), I couldn't be happier. Or in more meaningful terms, I couldn't be happier with my life. I'm going to suggest the inverse of what Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com preaches. He's big on figuring out what makes you happy, and it was inspiring for me to see. But being honest with myself, I felt that it wasn't very satisfying because it just seemed too idealistic for even my liking. If you gave someone a week to think about what makes them happy, they still won't be able to give you the correct answer. People are generally bad at thinking of what makes them happy, so instead of focusing on happiness, I think it's much more practical to focus on unhappiness because it's much easier for us to identify and eliminate. Identifying sources of unhappiness is the easy part. Eliminating them is the difficult part. but it's what makes life seem more interesting. I think entrepreneurs are so fascinating because they first eliminate that point of dissatisfaction in their own life, then dedicate their remaining time to helping others eliminate it too. My mom is a prime example: growing up in a poor family, she had no choice but to wear her older brother's hand-me-downs. There's nothing more depressing than a teenage girl wearing her older brother's ugly clothing. So as a 13 year old, my mom designed and sewed her own clothing. Soon later, she started doing this for others. Fast forward a few decades, and it's the driving force behind her career and the jobs of hundreds of people. As pessimistic as it sounds, I think that identifying your sources of unhappiness is the most effective and honest way for you to live a better life. (and find ideas for your next company) What do you hate? How can you turn it into helping yourself and ultimately helping others? And that's the key to happiness.

Since childhood, I've associated computer science with geeky and socially inept little boys, and for rational reason: because all of the computer geeks I knew were in fact geeky and socially inept little boys! But as I mentioned in my previous post about computer camp, I've wanted to go into tech from an early age -- before the idea of entrepreneurship ever occurred to me. However, as I became less socially inept, I began associating myself with the non-geeks. The jocks! The cheerleaders!

People often ask me if I feel as if I'm being taken advantaged of, or if being a girl makes things more difficult. No and yes -- I don't feel as if guys are mean to girls in computer science. If anything, guys are more willing to help a cute girl debug her code for obvious reason. But is it more difficult? From a social standpoint, definitely. Most girls in tech are podcasters or videobloggers -- Veronica Belmont, Julia Allison, and Alana Taylor among them. They're all great people, amazing at what they do, but that leaves few girls who are hardcore geeks. There aren't many girls starting their own companies. It's almost expected that I go into community or marketing, but I've since decided to go against these societal expectations.

I'm now at a crossroads in my educational career because I need to decide my major. Do I major in computer science, economics, international relations, or what? As a friend of mine mentioned, what if I'm terrible at computer science or what if I'm terrible at economics? The educational path I choose will determine the people I associate with in my classes. The computer science program at Simon's Rock attracts the uber geeks, whereas the economics program attracts the more popular kids. Why does this matter so much? Because I see education as being more than what's learned in the classroom -- it's the independent projects that I would start with my classmates. It affects my social life, which matters more than you might think for girls. Regardless as to what major I choose, I'll plan on surrounding myself with both econ and comp sci people.

As time goes by, the negative image of computer science and geeks will fade away. With more "socially capable" individuals in computer science, people like myself will feel more inclined to choose a math or science related subject as a major. I met Leah Culver at a dinner in Amsterdam, and her story is inspiring. She went to school thinking that she'd go into art or graphic design, and left with a degree in computer science. She did what she felt passionate about, and others like myself will follow in a similar path. Just last week, I met a girl through my blog named Cassie Wallender, who also began college at age 16 and took up programming and business from an early age. In the coming few years, we'll hopefully see more and more girls flooding the halls of science departments!

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.