Ciro Santilli This was one of the only bad experience Ciro had at Polytechnique, besides the inevitable fear of not graduating.
Ciro wanted to do a robotics internship in Germany, linked to his interests in artificial general intelligence, see also: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games".
But the head of the applied mathematics department Polytechnique prevented him from going because Ciro didn't have the necessary grades, even though the Germans had already agreed to it: he had a C, but he needed a B. As mentioned at École Polytechnique, most Brazilians had crappy grades due to their Polytechnique-incompatible background.
This was done because in the past students with bad grades had abandoned their internships halfway and given foreigners a bad impression of Polytechnique.
It is impossible to say if the head of department really agreed with this bullshit policy, or if it was something beyond his powers and he hid his true opinion, but it felt like the agreed.
What an extremely limited view!!!
To leave the worse, the worse. To assume that grades mean anything!
And thus Ciro had to choose a last moment internship that he hated, rather than becoming the greatest roboticist that ever lived, and did terribly at it.
At least on the other hand Ciro learnt Python instead of working at the internship, and became the greatest programming tutorial writer that ever lived. Maybe.