Kairan Quazi will graduate next week as an engineer from the Santa Clara University School of Engineering at just 14 years old. The following week he will join his new job as a software engineer for Starlink, SpaceX's satellite Internet service.
His is, never better said, a meteoric career. The teenager will become, on June 17, the youngest graduate in USC's 172-year history. And days later he will break another record, that of the youngest employee in Elon Musk's aerospace company.
Quazi is a rare bird. A prodigy of those who appear every long time. When she was 2 years old, she was already expressing herself fluently, forming complete sentences. In kindergarten she explained to her teachers and classmates the news she had heard on National Public Radio. “In kindergarten I learned that telling my friends that Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons against his own people made children cry on the playground,” Quazi told Braingainmag magazine.
At the age of 9, he confessed to his parents that school was not a mental challenge for him. After testing her IQ, doctors noted that not only was she above the 99.9th percentile in third grade, but her emotional intelligence was also "astonishingly high."
After certifying that he was "profoundly gifted", Quazi's parents transferred him to a special school, with a workload that made more sense to the boy. “I wasn't learning at the level that he needed to learn,” he told the Los Angeles Times. He later transferred to Santa Clara University. There he felt that he had finally found “his freedom to pursue a career that would allow him to solve the big problems” that he had to adapt to the academic world.
During this university stage, together with his mother, he drew up a list of companies in which to apply for an internship. Only the director of Intel's Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory, Lama Nachman, gave him an answer. “In a sea of so many 'no's from Silicon Valley's most lauded companies, he was the only leader who said yes. That door that opened changed everything,” Kairan writes on his LinkedIn page.
In the report that Braingainmag did when he was 9 years old, Quazi explained that he likes "Pokémon, video games, magic tricks, Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen Colbert, traveling and making friends." One of his abilities is what doctors call "asynchronous learning." That is, he has autonomy to learn things at his own pace, on his own schedule and in different ways.
An example of this is that you learned linear algebra concepts before attending algebra classes. Also worth noting is Quazi's knack for computer languages: he started programming in Python when he was 7 at YoungWonks Coding Academy.
“There are other areas where my brain is still catching up, like handwriting, spelling and note-taking,” Quazi said. “I don't learn foreign languages easily. I am trying to challenge myself by learning Bengali from my family and Mandarin from my very patient tutor Ms. Vienna,” she added. In addition, he is "obsessed with books." One of his favorites is Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, as well as the Game of Thrones series.
Quazi announced a few weeks ago on social networks that he was preparing for a job interview, without revealing what it was about. He later posted a screenshot of the email from him in which SpaceX informed him that they had accepted him into their team. Kairan, congratulations! SpaceX is pleased to extend the attached job offer for the position of Software Engineer. Once again, congratulations. Landing a SpaceX deal is no easy feat. We wish to have you on board soon”, ended the message.
The teen genius shared the news on his social networks and joked about what his first day of work will be like: “I will go from top to bottom with SpaceX merch. I'll be a walking advertisement! He's probably wearing jeans and a T-shirt, so he can be taken seriously as an engineer," the boy joked.
