Like thousands of 14-year-olds, Kairan Quazi graduates this month — but not from middle school. He’ll be getting his bachelor’s degree at Santa Clara University as the youngest graduate in the institution’s history, and then heading to SpaceX to become a software engineer.
“I’m really excited for this new chapter of my life,” said Kairan, who will be moving from Pleasanton to Washington state with his mom, Jullia, in July to join SpaceX’s Starlink team.
The clues were there from the start that Kairan (pronounced Ky-ren) was no ordinary kid.
Just a few months after her boy’s birth, Jullia began noticing Kairan’s “intense” temperament: if she was reading to him and stopped, for example, Kairan would throw a tantrum that could only be quieted by listening to NPR. By age 2, he was speaking in full sentences, and his doctors realized his intellectual and emotional intelligence were off the charts.
They recommended he start preschool immediately. But on his first day — which happened to occur while the Arab Spring uprising was spreading across the globe — the teacher told his parents that there had been a problem.
“He got up and declared that school was boring. And then, he got all of his friends in the classroom to start marching, chanting: Free Egypt, democracy now,” said Jullia. “He was 2. We were dumbfounded.”
In the years since, Kairan has been qualified as “profoundly gifted,” with an IQ above the 99.9th percentile of the general population. Unlike many children with such intelligence levels, Kairan is also incredibly socially attuned, his mother said — although in kindergarten, he did make all the kids cry when he told them at recess that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was wielding chemical weapons.
He was 5 years old.
“I think by third grade, it became painfully obvious to my teachers, parents and pediatrician that mainstream education wasn’t a great fit for my exponential learning abilities,” Kairan said in…
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