Despite your not-so-hot grades and "meh" test scores, you're determined to become an electrical engineer. You get into a trade school, and train to become an electrician. You learn the nuts and bolts of circuits and fuses, while earning a decent living and saving up to go back to school. Unfortunately, by the time you've saved enough, you're retired.

You graduate from a decent college with solid grades, and immediately join the work force. You're hired by an architecture firm and are eventually promoted to electrical design engineer. You spend years applying to better jobs at bigger companies, but nothing's doing. You spend the rest of your career disgruntled, but at least you're making decent money.

You get into a decent school, graduate, and are accepted into a grad program that has a sterling reputation. You stick it out and eventually graduate with your Ph.D. Your experience as a research assistant gives you an in for a nice tenure track assistant professorship. Welcome to academia.

All the hard work in school pays off when you land a job with a hotshot Silicon Valley company right out of college. You spend years working on various teams, but are now leading a team working on the next generation of self-driving cars. In fact, you rode in one to work this morning. Pretty sweet.

You breeze through school, eventually completing a Ph.D program. One night you dream up a new schematic (yes, by this point you dream in schematics) for a revolutionary new type of circuit. You build a prototype, land some serious investors, and before you know it, you're world famous with more money than you know what to do with.