Nurturing their talent

Veitshoechheim / DPA

“Before I came here I was unemployed for quite a while,” says 26-year-old Anna-Lisa Imkeller, as she stands at a high desk in the workshop of the Farassat Foundation.
Her table is covered with post-it notes, pens and papers, the model of a wind turbine stands on a shelf and the wall is covered with
large sheets of paper detailing her project’s schedule.
Imkeller is a highly gifted information-technology specialist but hadn’t been able to find a job. In retrospect, she says the reason was “because I could never open my mouth.” When she had a question she would first spend half an hour on the internet looking for the answer
before she dared to ask a colleague, she says.
Withdrawal is a symptom typical of highly gifted people who aren’t supported, especially women, says Wolfgang Schneider, an aptitude psychologist at the University of Wuerzburg.
“Girls retreat inside themselves and try to adapt to the situation,” he says.
Highly gifted people usually comprehend things faster than normal people, but when their talent isn’t nurtured, they quickly come into conflict with teachers or colleagues.
Feeling that they’re not accepted, the highly gifted can quickly become under-achievers, people whose intelligence is contradicted by their poor results.
Around one in ten highly gifted people end up becoming under-achievers, Schneider estimates. Schneider conducted an experiment to see what effect special training for highly gifted students would have on several hundred students in schools in two German states, Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg.
“Classes for the highly gifted can be particularly useful for under-achievers,” he says.
For those who don’t reach their potential after finishing school, “it may well be that bad experiences at school played an important role.” The Farassat Foundation, based in Veitshoechsheim, Germany, is the only institute in Germany that works with adult under-achievers, who include people who have failed to finish their university education, can’t find a profession or who have lost their jobs.
The foundation’s work has nothing to do with promoting elites, says its director Reinhard Foegelle. “Our people are no poster children,” he says. Imkeller and two of her colleagues on the project are the first to have finished a course at the foundation. Accompanied by a personality coach, they spent six weeks working for Woelful Engineering, a mid-sized technology company.
“We were really positively surprised by the result,” says owner Horst Peter Woelfel.
As part of an interdisciplinary team, Imkeller, a physicist and an engineer investigated the noise emissions of wind turbines.
They developed a system in which sensors measured vibrations bouncing off walls, making the sound waves visible. “It also impressed our experts,” says Woelful.
After the programme, Imkeller found a job working as a programmer for an agency.
The reason for her success she can summarize in just a few words: “Because I can open my mouth open now to ask things.”