I think fiction is very important because it gets us into the mind of a person. Hamlet is a tremendous piece of literature. You know Hamlet better than you know most real people. Do you know the reason? Because you know what he’s thinking. And this teaches you that every human has an integrity and an autonomy and a spirituality of his own, of her own, and great literature can teach you that.

That really crystallized for me what some really passionate founders who could write some code could do to change things, and this gave me the confidence to say, “You know what? They can do this. We can definitely do this.” ... So without a doubt, Reddit would not exist if it weren’t for Masters of Doom.

The first biography I read — I think the first scientific biography — was Madame Curie . And my mother, who was a surgeon, worked at the Marie Curie Hospital. She’d met Marie Curie, who was one of her great heroines. And reading the book, I think, was the first portrait of a scientist and the romance of a scientific life.

It’s amazing. I just started looking at everything differently. I love that book. But a book is a kind of thing of magic. It contains a universe of information.

And the most fulfilled, centered, grounded, happy people I know are people who made the choice to be part of an effort to actually make the world a better place. ... I would say, to me, the path of least regrets is to at least make a short-term commitment to say, “Let me work to make a real difference in the world.” The worst that could happen is you decide to move into something else later, but you’ll always take with you what you’ve given and what you’ve gained through that experience.

We focus on people and on cultivating local leadership: Wendy Kopp

Wendy Kopp: Education needs a systemic change - Mediamax.am

I applied to one firm in every sector. This was the most half-hearted job search. “I’ll apply for that management consulting firm and this investment bank…” and I applied for five jobs altogether, because my heart wasn’t in it. And thankfully… I’m so glad I didn’t get any of those big jobs! Because that made this decision easier.

Kopp ’89 Discusses Education Reform, Looking Beyond the Classroom | Princeton Alumni Weekly

There were definitely teachers who made a huge impact. I think about a woman whose name was Mrs. Fish who was my seventh grade English Language Arts teacher. What I remember about her was just how hard she pushed. I thought I was a perfectly strong student at this point, but she just pushed everyone to their limits. That was very instrumental for me. In fact, all the teachers I remember had that same thing: they just had such high expectations and wouldn’t stop pushing. I think she just conveyed the idea that good wasn’t good enough, and I think the skill development and critical thinking skills that that year developed were also instrumental. But I also think, I don’t know, there’s something about that year that probably instilled within me that ethic that you just have to keep pushing to get better and better, and that if you work hard enough it will pay off.