A 12-year-old genius has entered the second year of a degree program in Aerospace Engineering and has his sights set on entering the Georgia Institute of Technology or the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, two of the most renowned Universities in the world.
Caleb Anderson has long been an intellectual prodigy and could read by the time he was just 12 months old. Unwilling to sit back and learn at the same pace as his classmates, he was fast-tracked onto the degree program in order to get a head start on his dreams – to work for billionaire Elon Musk and eventually go into space.
He told CBS news channel:
"I'm not really smart. I just grasp information quickly. So, if I learn quicker, then I get ahead faster. This is my life. This is how I am. And I've been living this way my whole life … When I was like one, I always wanted to go to space. I figured that aerospace engineering would be the best path."
He does however say that life at school was hard for a gifted person such as himself. He added:
"The kids there, they kind of looked down on me, they treated me like I was an anomaly. And I kind of am."
His parents have been a great support to him, nurturing his abilities from a young age. His mother explained to reporters the decision to let him advance so quickly through his education:
"We want him to be in an environment where he is accepted and not tolerated."
It is highly unusual, but not unheard of, for very young people to obtain college degrees. In 1994, Michael Kearney earned a degree in Anthropology aged just 12 (the current world record holder). Another young genius, Alia Sabur, enrolled at Stony Brook University in New York, aged just 10. By the time she was 19, she was a university professor in South Korea. In 2019, it was expected that a 9-year-old Belgian boy, Laurent Simons, would graduate from an electrical engineering degree at Eindhoven's University of Technology making him the world's youngest graduate. However, he dropped out after failing to complete the examinations in full.
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