Beyond Selidor

Oh wow, I'm so angry on your behalf about that maths teacher! What an awful person, and in particular how vile that their awfulness closed off so many paths to you at such a young age. I have to say I really dislike school systems that force students to specialise at a comparably young age — I did the International Baccalaureate, and the one thing I particularly appreciate about that is that it was basically forbidden to specialise, because a broad range of subjects were mandatory (you had to do maths, at least one science subject, at least one foreign language, at least one humanities subject, world literature, and one final elective which could be another language, another science, or another humanities subject, plus a minor in philosophy, and community service/volunteering, sport/exercise, and some form of art or music). So essentially you had the prerequisites to study almost any degree at any university, and it's an internationally recognised programme so almost all universities around the world recognise its grading and can translate it into their own national system. The drawback is that it's mostly only offered at private schools, although in my case it was taught at a state/public school. It sounds as if the Danish system at the time was set up to accommodate lots of different potential career paths and interests — except for people who didn't know what they wanted to do at the time when they were being forced to make these decisions!

It sounds as if, once a career in STEM was closed off to you, you probably would have ended up in publishing anyway, although as you say a very different career in a very different country. I guess this is similar to how I probably would have become a librarian, just in Australia instead of in the UK — a different kind of librarian, with a very different social circle.