Outside the Norm

Continued from page 2

He Ain't No Prodigy, Father
MIT professor Erik Demaine's office is in the Stata Center. If the building's futuristic, cartoonlike exterior boggles the brain, then Demaine is the perfect tenant. On his desk, plastic gadgets abound, as do bluish pieces of glass that Demaine himself--an avid glassblower who also counts juggling and improvisational comedy among his extracurricular passions--has created.

Lanky, bearded, with abundant light-brown hair bound in a ponytail, Demaine looks like a guitarist in a Phish tribute band. He grew up on the road: his father, a single parent, supported himself and his young son by selling handcrafted jewelry at art shows all over the country. Rarely living in one place long enough assimilate into the local school system, Demaine was homeschooled by his father.

"I loved video games," he says, "so one day I asked my father how they work." A neighbor had an old computer, and on it Demaine learned some of the basics of writing code, with his father's coaching. He was seven at the time. At 12, he entered Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he majored in computer science. By 14, he was in a PhD program at Waterloo University in Ontario. "I took it slow with the PhD," he says, "realizing that if I ever wanted to live the normal life of a student, now was my last chance."

Demaine has been a professor at MIT for four years. He is 24 years old.

While Demaine might seem like a real-life counterpart to Matt Damon's Good Will Hunting supergenius character, he eschews any such comparison. Ask him his IQ, and he can't answer. Convinced that IQ testing is pointless at best and misleading at worst, Demaine has refused to have his measured. Call him a prodigy and he positively bristles.

"I hate that word," he says, not without a trace of contempt.

Spurning such labels isn't false modesty. Demaine believes that while his situation is atypical, it shouldn't be.

"The biggest misconception is that this sort of thing should be such an unusual phenomenon," he says. "I think that many people could go to university much earlier than they do. Maybe not 12, but 16 should be easy."

What hinders most teenagers' development, in Demaine's opinion, isn't television or peer pressure or any of the cultural temptations that compete with school for attention; it's school itself, the one-size-fits-all approach of public education. When Demaine briefly enrolled in public school during a slightly longer-than-usual stint in Miami Beach, FL, he was surprised by the boredom he felt and struck by the vast stretches of wasted time. "I think the existing system is very broken," he says.

For those unusually bright students who never found schools where they really fit in, MIT can be a home away from home. But it can also require them to make some adjustments.

"Oftentimes," says Randolph, "the hardest things...students face is coming to MIT and facing the possibility of being just average. If being an academic star is what got you through those early years, it can be hard to adjust to not being able to do anything better than a B." And if this is the case for the average MIT student, how much more might it be true for people who have spent their adolescences bearing the "prodigy" label?

For these exceptional students, however, feeling unexceptional may be the best proof that, finally, they really do fit in. As Tay puts it, "MIT has killed whatever ego I had."