"Are you really smart or really rich?" strangers ask when I tell them I go to Harvard. Last week's grade report settled the issue: from now on, I'd better be able to say rich.

Some of my peers, on the other hand, won't need Daddy come graduation. Erudite, accomplished and exceptional, these girl geniuses and boy wonders out-read Will Hunting, out-calculate Rainman and out-fly E.T. They're the best and the brightest of the best and the brightest. The crme de la crme of the cream of the crop. The smartest students at Harvard. Or something like that.

I will find them, I vow. And then I will find their secrets.

A few friends tip me off to an advanced-standing senior who finished most of the coursework for an economics Ph.D. in his three years as an undergrad. He was a TF in a graduate class in statistics taken by his assistant senior tutor. Adviser Marty Feldstein told him his thesis on theories of investment was a "home run."

"There was no reconciliation between what historically has been going on and what the theories predict," he tells me. "I was lucky with my thesis. The data matched."

The secret of his success? "I'm into the mathematical stuff which is why I was accelerated. Most people take econometrics junior year, but I took it freshman year." More important, he says, "I've gotten good advice throughout. My father is an economist so I had an understanding of the kinds of things that would be useful. Marty has been instrumental. [He's] been advising me since the fall of freshman year."

The fall of my freshman year, I sold my Ec-10 textbook to my roommate and shopped an English seminar instead.

Oops.