(GoRealNewsNow.com) – A 14-year-old child genius who has become the youngest graduate of Santa Clara University in California has been hired by Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX.
The child prodigy, Kairan Quazi, already a software engineer, is from the San Francisco Bay Area, where his parents emigrated from Bangladesh.
He is graduating from the Santa Clara University School of Engineering on June 17. The Guardian reports that he is scheduled to start work at SpaceX’s Starlink division even as he cannot get a drink at a bar or watch an R-rate film at a movie theater by himself.
Quazi, whose early graduation story has gone viral on social media, says he has had a “fairly normal academic journey.”
Besides leaving a mark in Santa Clara University’s 172-year history, the 14-year-old will enter Oldest.org’s list of the ten youngest college graduates. Quazi is the same age as the numbers 6-9 on the list.
His family learned about his advanced intellect when he was 2, and he could say complete sentences, KGO TV reports.
In kindergarten, he listened to National Public Radio and told his teachers and classmates about the reports he heard.
IQ tests that Quazi took in third grade showed his intelligence to be in the 99.9th percentile of the general population.
As he wasn’t challenged by school work, his parents, teachers, and pediatrician decided “mainstream education wasn’t the right path” for him.
He enrolled at Las Positas community college, where he was also a tutor, and two years later, at the age of 11, transferred to Santa Clara University to study computer science and engineering.
At Santa Clara, he earned an Intel research lab internship on generative artificial intelligence.
“I felt like I was learning at the level that I was meant to learn,” Quazi told The Los Angeles Times about his college experience.
He played video games and read books in his free time, particularly by sci-fi author Philip K Dick and journalist Michael Lewis.
“I think after a few days the novelty of me being there wore off,” Quazi said.
He thanked his mother for “uprooting” her life to move with him to Washington state for his SpaceX job.
