Coming at Chu

The University just announced that Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, will be this year's Commencement speaker.  Not a huge surprise, considering Harvard's new green initiative and Al Gore's recent speech in Tercentenary Theatre.  Green is the new Crimson, baby. But although Harvard is digging that Chu is a passionate advocate for renewable energy, his passion for academics went somewhat...unappreciated by the Ivy Leagues in an earlier go-round.  In his autobiography on the Nobel Prize web site, he writes of how he was rejected by all the Ivy League schools he applied to--including, FlyByBlog presumes, Harvard, where two cousins were attending.  The relevant passage after the jump:

"I applied to a number of colleges in the fall of my senior year," Chu writes, "but because of my relatively lackluster A-average in high school, I was rejected by the Ivy League schools, but was accepted at Rochester. By comparison, my older brother was attending Princeton, two cousins were in Harvard and a third was at Bryn Mawr.... As I prepared to go to college, I consoled myself that I would be an anonymous student, out of the shadow of my illustrious family."

Who's illustrious now, Chu family?

(Public domain photo from United States Department of Energy/Wikimedia Commons)