August 2005

Outside the Norm

Continued from page 1

By David Cameron

Unschooled
Each year, a handful of "underage" teenagers are among MIT's incoming students. The university takes no initiative to court them, but anywhere from one to five, ranging in age from 14 to 16, join the MIT community annually. What do these wunderkinder look like, talk like, act like? Do they spend all night sweating bullets over their laptops, or do they just lounge around their dorms effortlessly completing multiple homework assignments at once? Do they play chess blindfolded? Can they go a whole night speaking only in palindromes?

These questions are hard to answer, because if there's any trait these students share, it's the desire to blend in--to have their age be about as relevant as their eye color. Their birth dates matter far more to us than to them. No one knows this more than senior associate dean for students Robert Randolph.

"We try to be aware of these students, but the one thing we keep running up against is that they want to be treated just like everyone else," says Randolph. "Conscious efforts to do things over the years, like have a support group, haven't gone over well. We just monitor them from a distance and try not to be obtrusive."

Reese, in particular, has blended in nicely. In addition to her duties as soda machine master, she's also on the fencing team. Last year, she made the conference all-star team.

Other young students have had equal success blending in outside the classroom. Last year, as a 17-year-old freshman, Nivair (Nina) Gabriel spent her Friday afternoons meeting with the MIT Writers Group, where she's revising the 200-page novel she wrote at 14. Seventeen-year-old freshman Derric Tay was a member of the Tech Squares, MIT's square-dancing club. And this past spring, if you happened to wander past a classroom and overhear a young man teaching a for-credit seminar on poverty and HIV in Africa, that was 17-year-old sophomore Raja Bobbili.

Talk to each of these students, though, and the first thing that strikes you is how dissimilar their personalities, temperaments, and interests appear to be. The journeys that brought them to MIT differ as well. But there is a common theme running through all their stories: disrupted, and at times outright broken, relationships with the schools they attended.

Consider Gabriel, who entered MIT at age 16. She grew up in Pittsburgh. Both of her parents are MIT alums and were professors at Carnegie Mellon. But Gabriel hated school. To her, it was a thicket of red tape, a quagmire of mediocrity. "It was all mental stagnation and stupid bureaucracy," she says, relieved that she's finally at a point in her life where she can laugh about it. "The few good teachers were frustrated all the time."

Even though all her classes were honors level, Gabriel was still miserable. She felt out of place among her fellow students, whose idea of fun, it seemed to her, was getting stoned in fast-food parking lots. So she applied all her energy to excelling academically and graduating early.

But however much she may have hated high school, it's hard to imagine anyone who could love MIT more. "I feel like I'm a completely different person," she says ebulliently. "Even my family tells me that I seem so much happier now. I'm finally doing things that are important. It's hard and challenging, and it feels like everyone around me is smarter than me, but the people are great."

As for the future, Gabriel is still deciding whether she wants to be a fiction writer or an astronaut.

Or take Bobbili, as ambitious a student as you'll ever meet--though you'd never know it from his shy demeanor. He speaks so quietly that you might have to ask him to repeat himself every so often. Born in India, Bobbili (pronounced bob-il-ee) grew up in Zambia, where his father was a mining engineer. He attended private school through seventh grade, when his father's company collapsed. No longer able to afford tuition, and with the Zambian public schools too deplorable to be considered, Bobbili opted to stay home and teach himself. He turned out to be a good teacher: by the time he was 13, he was a high-school graduate.

His parents, meanwhile, had started their own business and were able to afford school for Bobbili just as he finished it on his own. Still, he decided to reenroll anyway and take advantage of the resources and opportunities he was denied as a homeschooler, such as lab equipment and organized sports. Bobbili took International Baccalaureate courses, and when he entered MIT at 16, he had already earned a year of college credit.

Reese's experience was neither as dramatic as Bobbili's nor as visceral as Gabriel's, but she still lacked a school to call her own. Growing up in a military family, she changed schools every year or two. "It was hard to make friends," she says. "School and a social life weren't a constant, but studies were." Taking advanced-placement classes online, Reese had, by her junior year, pretty much exhausted everything high school had to offer.

Tay's experience, too, was a mixture of home- and traditional schooling. A double major in chemical engineering and biology, Tay was homeschooled from the third grade; he entered high school at age 12 and became, among other things, a member of the debate team. He is a fast talker, and his ability to verbally spar is indicative of someone who cut his teeth in the rough-and-tumble of public debates. Tay has chosen a humanities concentration in political science.

Which leads to another common denominator among these students that may help explain why they fit so well into the MIT community: like many of their classmates, they have a wide range of interests. Tay's dual interest in biochemistry and politics and Gabriel's passion for both writing and aeronautical engineering have their counterpart in Reese's devotion to a demanding subject outside her major: she is minoring in Chinese language and literature. Bobbili is double-majoring in electrical engineering and computer science and economics. He's still deciding whether he wants to go into patent law or diplomacy.

The students' wide range of interests and activities perhaps explains why Randolph's support group has never gotten off the ground: its would-be members appear to have little, if any, trouble adjusting. Talk to them, and you don't get the feeling that they are somehow overdeveloped "kids" coping with the shell shock of being plopped into a world they're ill equipped to handle. Rather, the ease and the excitement with which they've acclimated to MIT lead to a rather unexpected question: what took them so long to get there?