The precocious Wright spent only five years in grade school as his learning was supplemented at home by his intellectual parents. In 1902, he entered Galesburg High School in Illinois, where he excelled at languages, especially Latin and German. The courses that intrigued Wright most, however, were algebra, geometry, and physics. Wright then attended Lombard College in Galesburg, where his father was employed. His original intention was to continue the study of languages. Wright enrolled in several classes taught by his father, including general mathematics and economics, and a course on the fiscal history of the United States. In his senior year, Wright took two biology classes from Wilhemine Key, who introduced him to the relatively new discipline of theoretical biology and to R. C. Punnett' s groundbreaking article, "Mendelism," which had just appeared in the eleventh edition of
Encyclopedia Britannica. Key steered Wright toward graduate study in biology and set up an internship in zoology for him at Columbia University's Cold Spring Harbor laboratory on Long Island, New York. After graduating from Lombard College in 1911, Wright spent the summer at Cold Spring Harbor, where he studied marine invertebrates. While there, Wright also met a number of influential geneticists and began to take an interest in the field.
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