Despite the massive attendance and endless relevant sessions, I believe that I had a productive time at the AERA conference this year. My objectives were to reconnect with colleagues, meet new ones, and learn more about some of my areas of interest. Here are the highlights in chronological order: Because I have a dataset of college students, a subsample of which were in gifted and talented programs, I attended a session on the Gifted after K-12 . I learned about some really neat opportunities out of the University of Washington which allows students to skip high school all together with other options involving only 2 years of high school. This was personally interesting to me because I decided to leave after 3 years of high school and my school counselor tried to discourage me (and my mom) because it limits the options of universities (no Ivy League). At any rate, there are pros and cons to these programs, as evidenced by researchers at UW and even Dr. Mammadov at VSU. I ho...