<p>I don’t really think age is as big a deal to students, at least at top colleges, as some might think. My son had just turned 15 when he took a graduate course in which his fellow students wrote comments on their teacher evaluation forms at the end of the semester that noted things like: “(Son’s name) should have been an official TA for this course. He was more helpful than the official TAs” and came to his office after the last class and told them they had done so. This was likely the reason he was asked to be a TA for the course the next time it was taught one year later (when he had just turned 16) and as far as we can tell, none of the graduate students in the class even had a clue that he was young. In February, a fellow student from the time our son was in the class as a student invited our son and his parents (as we happened to be visiting him that weekend) to her 31st birthday party (at the home of yet another student from that class, who was now dating the gal), and while there, our son was speaking with a student he had in the graduate class he TAed the prior semester. This guy was almost 24 and was in complete disbelief when he first learned that our son was younger than he was; it never had crossed his mind that his TA might have been younger than he. And if you go farther back in time, our son was tutoring calculus students in the math lab at his university when he was 9 and while everyone back then knew he was a young kid as he looked his age, students still requested our son as their tutor rather than the typical aged tutors as they claimed he was able to explain things in ways they could understand, so he was even getting respect of a sort before he physically blended in well with other students.</p>