Generational STEM

My parents didn't finished HS. Some of my grandparents finished elementary school, some not.

I am a physics major.

It doesn't say much. My mom studied and has a PhD but she is not nearly as smart as my dad which wasn't able to study because of financial reasons yet he's been programming operating systems for mainframe manufactures like IBM for over 30 years.

Dad works in accounting, mom in the final assembly line of an aerospace company. Decided to become an engineer when I noticed mom makes more than dad and doesn't work nearly as hard. Now I make more than either of them.

I do, however, have a cousin who became an engineer 4 years before me, and another that's been a programmer for quite a while.

No.
No.
No.

for the latter, post sources if you can actually make that claim

Mt parents are both PhDs. I failed out of community college because of social anxiety and work as a server.

I make more money than them.

Parents are all RN's.
I'm a microbio major.

They make hella bank, but I have a way easier job. I maintain a vat of E coli that makes tryptophan and glycine. I'm thinking about opening up my own business and doing something similar but with leucine and isoleucine

I'm the only one that hasn't had kids before 20 though so there's that.

Hook me up with your dad, I want to intern at lockheed

No one in my extended family even has a degree. Doesn't make me feel special being in STEM though, since everyone has a degree these days.

Both my parents were from families of farmers in some east European shithole. I am to my knowledge the only one who made it into STEM (in my case physics) in my family.

And yes, to me it appears that it definitely is a family thing. If your closer family is a bunch of losers, then it's very likely that you'll end up as one as well. Most of my peers have parents who are in STEM as well. It's no coincidence.

Dad was an engineer and failed a math teacher exam at some point in his later career (but he hadn't done math in a while). He has a crazy memory and pretty good reasoning skills but he doesn't do much of anything science-related these days. He tried to teach me classical geometry when I was a kid but I found it super boring. Then at some point I understood why math was interesting on my own.
Mom is a secretary and couldn't perform logical reasoning to save her life, to the point where I sometimes wonder if she's messing with me but she is charismatic, kind of a neat freak, has great imagination (kinda paranoid), a great memory, great organizational and money skills etc.
I think she could have done much better with her life but she never had the chance to study during her childhood or teenage years.