9-Year-Old Working On College Degree

[al6200]

We see a story like this every couple of years, and I'm sure there are more prodigies out there who keep a low profile. But it seems that at some point they level out and become indistinguishable from the other PhD's and post-docs who took longer to get there. You would expect that if they stayed on their incredibly steep trajectories, they'd be winning all the Nobel prizes and changing the world--but I don't think it works out that way. I'd love to see a follow-up story on all the child geniuses who have been publicized over the last 20 years.

That's an interesting point. Even if prodigies (lets say IQ > 160) have a higher probability of top outcomes than smart non-prodigies, we would still expect to see people with IQs in the 130s winning noble prizes because the number of people in that range greatly exceeds the number at the very top.

[ZombieDante]

Great another kid who makes me feel like an idiot...but in all seriousness, I wonder how they do once they get out into the real world, because they will probabaly be to young to enter the workforce and by the time they are they probably aren't use to the social aspects of it.

[bamboobanga]

sometimes they grow bigger and start to chase after girls or boys.. distracting !!

[wis75]

An IQ in the 130's is low end gifted, more like an average top college student. Even 140's may seem exceptionally smart to most but will be found populating many public U's Honors programs. Meeting the needs of exceptionally/severely gifted students is just as difficult as meeting those who are severely retarded. There is no way to give them a "normal" childhood and meet their intellectual needs, as well as social needs.

[UCDAlum82]

It's great to hear how some turn to academics as a career and do well. They don't all turn into a sad story like Adragon de Mello.

My daughter, as a freshman, was taking an upper division course where the TA was 15. He bonded with her as she was the closest to his age (and she looked his age.) He was saying how he wanted to go to med school, but his parents didn't think he was mature enough until he was at least 18, so until then he'd just rack up Phds. (And have his mom drive him to school.) She said other than his obvious genius, he was a regular 15 year old; tethered to his smart phone, into skate boarding. She thought he was very cool, and noted his parents must have done a great job to keep him a kid while being in college so young.

[nwcrazy]

@MommaJ-

I completely agree. I think many of these kids are exceptional when they are young and they're being compared to their young peers. However, once they get out into the REAL world, they are compared to EVERYONE. For many, the world just catches up.

[goinganywhere]

another thing is when you are young and smart you can just be treated like an older student and continue learning, but once you finish your phd research and so on, you can no longer just follow the road paved by the university, as you might by then know as much about your particular area of interest in your specialty (at least in newer fields) as almost anyone else in the world. Then you have to do the much slower and less certain work of paving new roads yourself.

[starbright]

I actually enjoy and am usually intrigued/in awe of child prodigies, but after watching the CNN video of this particular child, I was astounded by how much he actually sounded exactly like a 9 year old (which is great! but it also led me to google his name). Reading this wiki entry made me cringe. Clearly the parents of these kids are taking this wayyyy too seriously. This is not to criticize the little boy but makes me really wonder about his parents (sure be prideful...but this seems like ridiculous overkill...at least if you've spent any time on CC):

Tanishq Mathew Abraham - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[bovertine]

I think the four year old needs some more leadership activities to round out her ap, but if she can give voice to her passion in her essays and get good recs she should be okay.

[prefect]

I can't believe the Wikipedia article says "they have participated in trick or treating for UNICEF".

[siliconvalleymom]

Maybe they read the "hidden ECs" thread on CC!

[Momzie]

My dad's a doctor and whenever he used to read these newspaper stories, he would comment that the parents who claimed the child talked at two or three months were insane. I remember him noting that while some mental feats might indeed occur, some things are simply physiologically impossible. It had something to do with motor control, as I recall.

[Python20]

The nice thing about the video camera age is that people can show their kids doing something at age 4 months - that others simply dismissed.

Yes, there are physical milestones that need to be reached and some children reach them earlier than others. Some children way earlier. That does not make the parents insane.

[emberjed]

It sickens me how much praise child prodigies get. They never do anything to deserve the high degrees of intelligence they have that others haven't. It's all in the cards. My guess is that they don't really like all the attention when it happens yet crave it once it fades away after they peak.

According to my parents, I could count to twenty in English and Spanish and read children's books and road signs when I was two. As an incoming senior in high school (no, I haven't skipped any grades, though I was offered the opportunity once), I'm no more successful than the next guy, and I'm sure as hell not winning any prizes anytime soon (though I wouldn't consider myself to have been intelligent enough to have been in the prodigy pool). Conversely, some of my peers who, I'd guess, have average to above-average IQs, are very charismatic, have perfect or almost perfect GPAs, are dominant in several clubs each, and are inspirations to those around them, and they'll likely be much more successful in life than I will.

Intelligence is far from being a scale-tipping factor in determining one's success in life, and the more we act like it is, the more unhealthily d#$%-waving our society becomes.

[sammygirl8]

I wonder why this boy does not stay with the Stanford program for gifted kids. The kids in this program can take university courses. The Stanford courses, one would think, would be more challenging than community college courses, he could continue to be in touch with similar kids, and the faculty includes people like Condaleeza Rice. This is not to disparage community colleges. I attended a community college as a young student and felt a bit like an oddball around the adult learners. As an adult, I've taught community college, and found that the gifted students don't find the coursework--or the faculty--challenging enough, and can get bored.

What do you fellow posters think?