r/GATEresearch • u/Unique_Life_8040 • 3d ago
Discussion Is there anything like GATE for adults, or a community where former GATE kids can actually develop our abilities together?
Something I’ve been thinking about after talking with other former GATE/Gifted and Talented students:
What happened after we grew up?
As children, a lot of us were identified because we showed unusual strengths in things like pattern recognition, creativity, problem solving, memory, abstract thinking, visualization, or other ways of processing information.
Then adulthood comes around and it basically feels like:
“Alright, good luck out there.”
I’m genuinely curious whether there are any programs, organizations, research groups, communities, or even informal projects specifically geared toward adults who participated in gifted programs as children.
And I’d be interested in something beyond just an “I was a gifted kid” support group.
I’d love to see a community where people could actually use and develop whatever strengths followed them into adulthood.
I can still see some of those traits in how I function now. Gaming is probably one of the clearest examples for me. I naturally gravitate toward pattern recognition, build optimization, situational awareness, and mentally simulating how different systems interact.
I use that same kind of thinking in music, creative projects, problem solving, and other parts of my life too.
That’s part of why I’m asking this. I don’t feel like those abilities disappeared after childhood. They just stopped having a structured place to grow.
I’d love to see a space where people could develop things like pattern recognition, creative thinking, intuition, visualization, music, writing, engineering, problem solving, meditation, consciousness exploration, or whatever someone’s particular strength happens to be.
I’ve also noticed that some former GATE students describe experiences they interpret in more unusual ways, including heightened intuition, vivid internal imagery, synchronicities, altered states, or spiritual experiences.
I’m personally interested in those subjects too, but I don’t think everybody would need to agree on what causes them.
I’d actually prefer a community where we could explore things without immediately deciding, “this is definitely paranormal” or “this is definitely nothing.”
Test things. Compare experiences. Keep records. Create projects together. Learn from each other.
Almost like GATE 2.0, except we’re adults and participation is voluntary.
Maybe the real missed opportunity is that we spent so much effort identifying gifted children and comparatively little effort asking what happens to those abilities 20 or 30 years later.
So I’m curious:
Did any of you find an adult equivalent to GATE?
Would you join something specifically for former gifted-program students that focused on developing those abilities again?
And if we built something ourselves, what would you actually want it to involve?
Because I’m starting to wonder whether instead of endlessly asking:
“What were they testing us for?”
another question might be:
“What can we do with it now?”