A child prodigy describes finishing three undergraduate degrees by age 16: neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry with a math minor. They started college at 12 after accelerating through high school, lived at home, and commuted by bus while fielding media attention from a young age.
The path progressed where eventually I was 11 and I had gone through like a sort of virtual high school curriculum and it was just kind of obvious that, hey, there's nothing else, the next step is college. So I took the SATs, ACTs, and then started college when I was 12.
Pretty unusual. And then got 3 or 4 undergraduate degrees. Degrees, right?
Yeah. By the time you were 16, I did 3 degrees in 4 years.
Neurobiology, biochemistry, and chemistry.
Yeah.
And a minor in math? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Um, unbelievable. And, and I saw your mom made what seems like a sensible decision. You'd applied to other schools, but she, she didn't want you to live in a dorm.
And so, yeah, I was, I was living at home and I would take the bus to college every day. And, um, Yeah, it was, it was weird for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think, look, I mean, people read about these stories, they always catch people's attention. Um, was it— yeah, does this— I don't like— what is it like to— people are writing stories about you from such a young age, and I couldn't tell if one feels like a freak, if one's proud, if, um, it's just your life, you don't know anything else, and so just, yeah, what it is.
