Some Nobel laureates were straight-A students from the get-go. But others AFP spoke to recounted how they cut class, got expelled, and had doubts about their future.

Perhaps the most illustrious Nobel Prize winner, Albert Einstein, was once a mediocre student at Zurich Polytechnic School, now ETH Zurich.

The young Einstein skipped classes, wanted to study physics exclusively, and finished second-last in his class in 1900.

After graduating, he was the only student not offered a research assistant position, according to the Swiss university’s website.

Einstein went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.

Frances Arnold, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, also cut classes after a turbulent start to her education in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.

“I was disruptive. I was just bored and well beyond what the rest of the kids in the class were doing. And the teachers often gave me little projects decorating the classroom and things like that,” she recalled in an interview with AFP.

At the age of 10, she was allowed to take high school courses such as geometry — a challenge she appreciated at first.

But by the time she reached her teens, she wasn’t enjoying school anymore to the point that she stopped going and was expelled.

“I guess I wasn’t interested in what they had to teach us. Or if I was interested in it, I just learned it on my own from a textbook. So I managed to pass all my classes despite many absences, I would say.”

Now aged 69, she acknowledges that hers is not a model to follow, but believes schools should show more flexibility.

“They don’t have the wherewithal to do anything special for the kids who really would benefit,” she lamented.

Overcoming challenges

David Card, the 2021 Nobel economics laureate, also had unconventional educational beginnings. “There’s almost nobody I’ve met… in an economics PhD programme that has a background like mine where they went to a rural school.”

Born on a farm in Canada in the 1950s, he was enrolled in a small one-room schoolhouse, where one teacher taught around 30 students at different grade levels.

“The way the teacher did it was she would spend some time with each row, which was one of the grades. I actually paid attention to a couple of grades beyond mine for most of the material,” he said.

“So you could kind of accelerate very quickly, very easily.”

The system was less ideal for students who needed more individualised support, he acknowledged.

According to the Nobel Foundation, other laureates had to overcome major academic challenges before going on to win the prestigious Nobel.

The first woman to win the economics prize, Elinor Ostrom, was turned down when she applied for a PhD in economics; 2009 medicine prize laureate Carol Greider struggled with dyslexia as a child; and 2015 chemistry prize winner Tomas Lindahl failed chemistry in high school.

Humble beginnings

Arnold and Card both started working at a young age, which the two consider an important life experience.

In her teens, Arnold held odd jobs as a waitress, receptionist and taxi driver.

“You appreciate more what the university education can give to you, in terms of getting a job you actually might want to have for the rest of your life.”

“It also teaches you how to organise your time.”

Similarly, Card juggled school and farm life very early on.

“I don’t think there was that much homework back then in my schools. So there was lots of time,” he recalled.

“I helped my father. I learned to drive a tractor when I was about 11. Every morning, I got up at 5am and helped him milk the cows and then I would have a shower and go to school.”

Both prizewinners also studied other subjects before discovering their respective passions.

Arnold pursued studies in mechanical engineering and aeronautics before turning to chemistry.

“I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. I went into mechanical engineering because it had the fewest requirements for engineering,” she admitted.

And Card initially studied physics before switching to economics.

Despite their unconventional paths, both ultimately found their way to brilliance.

• Typhoon Bualoi leaves 14 people missing and injured 164 others.
• Disaster management agency raises estimate of property damage. 
• More than 230,000 houses damaged or inundated by typhoon.

The death toll in Vietnam from Typhoon Bualoi and the floods it triggered has risen to 51, according to a Friday government report, as the central bank urged banks to support affected businesses.

Bualoi made landfall on Monday in northern central Vietnam, bringing huge sea swells, strong winds and heavy rains that also left 14 people missing and injured 164 others, according to the report from the government’s disaster management agency.

The agency also raised its estimate of property damage caused by the typhoon and its flooding to 15.9 trillion dong ($603 million), up from $435.8 million in a previous report released on Thursday.

The typhoon severely damaged roads, schools and offices, and caused power grid failures that left tens of thousands of families without electricity, the report said.

More than 230,000 houses were damaged or inundated, and nearly 89,000 hectares of rice and other crops were destroyed, it said.

The report did not mention any major damage to industrial properties.

Vietnam is a regional manufacturing hub, and large factories in or near the typhoon’s path included some owned by Foxconn, Formosa Plastics, Luxshare and Vinfast.

The central bank has told banks to consider restructuring or freezing loans for firms hit by the typhoon, deputy governor Pham Thanh Ha said on Friday.

Two years of war, multiple displacements, and the deaths of her husband and father have reduced Lamis Dib’s life in Gaza to a relentless fight for survival.

“It’s indescribable,” the 31-year-old mother of two said of the war that continues to devastate the Palestinian territory.

“Friday, October 6, 2023, the last day before the war, was a beautiful day,” she recalled.

Her oldest daughter, Suwar, five at the time, had just started kindergarten, and Dib would watch her come home every afternoon from the window of their apartment in Sheikh Radwan, a middle-class neighbourhood in the north of Gaza City.

Her son Amin, then three, “was taking up all of my time”, said Dib, who would often bring him to the nearby seaside.

Dib had studied to become a social worker, but could not find a job in Gaza’s impoverished pre-war economy, partly stunted by a strict Israeli blockade since 2007.

But she had built “a happy family” with her husband, an accountant who ensured that she “never lacked anything”.

Their neighbourhood was one of the first to be hit by Israeli strikes in October 2023.

Israel’s military campaign has since killed at least 66,225 Palestinians in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the health ministry, which the United Nations considers reliable.

The destruction in Gaza is vast, with entire neighbourhoods flattened and millions of tonnes of rubble now covering areas where families once lived.

Buildings, hospitals, schools, water and sanitation systems have borne the brunt of Israeli attacks, and the humanitarian consequences for the territory’s more than two million people have been severe.

Hundreds of thousands of homeless Gazans have crowded into shelters, makeshift camps and open areas, lacking even basic protections.

‘Race against death’

When Dib’s area was struck, she and her family fled to a nearby district —the first of a series of displacements — before leaving northern Gaza for the city of Khan Yunis in the south.

“One of the most difficult days of our lives,” Dib said, describing their long expedition along torn-up roads and through military checkpoints.

She and her children have been displaced 11 times as fighting between Israel and Hamas rages.

“Each move was a race against death, under airstrikes. It was as if I was on autopilot, I carried my kids, held them against me, and ran without looking back, without knowing where we were going,” she said.

When the family relocated to the southern city of Rafah for a time, shortages and overcrowding were the norm.

“For six months, in Rafah, 30 of us would sleep in a single room with no toilets. It was hard to express what we felt: confinement, nonstop air strikes, hunger, thirst, lack of hygiene and a total absence of privacy,” she said.

In August 2024, the family was living in the central Gaza refugee camp of Nuseirat when Dib’s life changed again.

“On a Friday at 6pm, my husband and my father were on the rooftop with five young people from the family, when we heard the sound of a missile and saw smoke,” she said.

“I ran towards the rooftop, and the scene was unimaginable; they were all dead.

“My husband’s body seemed intact, I thought he was alive. I tried to wake him up, but he had been struck in the head. And then I found my father’s body […] his hand had been blown off.”

‘A little bit of peace’

From that day on, Dib had to care for her children alone, just when life in Gaza was at its hardest.

She moved into a tent in Al-Zawayda, a camp where thousands of Palestinians share the same harsh daily life, living under tarps that flap in the wind, bake under the summer heat and leak during the winter rains.

“Everything is difficult,” she said from inside her shelter.

While her friends can appeal to their fathers or husbands for help, Dib must weather the unending financial difficulties by herself.

In May 2025, Israel eased a total blockade on supplies that it imposed in March, but the humanitarian aid trickling in since then has not been enough, the UN says.

“Our children were robbed of education, food, and a normal life,” she said as Suwar and Amin studied on her knees.

Sometimes, they look at photos of their father and relatives killed during the war on Dib’s phone.

“We’ll return to our home,” she said. “We will rebuild it, but we just want a little bit of peace.”

Like their mother, Suwar and Amin are mostly preoccupied with survival, tasked with filling up the family’s jerrycans at a temporary water station near the tent.

For them, the war’s consequences may outlast the airstrikes.

The UN’s agency for children, Unicef, estimated in 2024 that every child in Gaza was in need of psychological support.