Kairan Quazi enrolled in community college at age of nine because third-grade was "not challenging enough"
Age is really only a number when it comes to Kairan Quazi, who will soon become the youngest software engineer at Starlink and the youngest person to graduate from Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering.
According to the South China Morning Post, Kairan Quazi, a
14-year-old from Santa Clara, California, has been appointed as SpaceX's
newest software engineer, becoming the space agency's youngest employee.
He
said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday: "I will be joining the coolest company
on the planet as a software engineer on the Starlink engineering team. One
of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated
proxy for maturity and ability."
The Los Angeles Times reported that Quazi had already begun
speaking full sentences at the age of two, according to his parents. Later,
in kindergarten, he would tell other kids and teachers about news stories he
had heard on the radio.
His parents even enrolled him at a
community college in California at the age of nine when his third-grade
schoolwork did not seem challenging enough for him.
“I felt like
I was learning at the level that I was meant to learn,” he told the LA
Times.
His parents told BrainGain Magazine that the same year he
enrolled in community college, he was placed in the 99.9th percentile of the
general population on an IQ test.
Quazi was hired as an AI
research co-op fellow at Intel Labs a few months later as part of an
internship, and by the age of 11, he transferred to Santa Clara University
to study computer science and engineering.
According to his
LinkedIn page, he worked as a machine learning intern at the cyber
intelligence company Blackbird.AI for four months last year.
According
to his profile, he contributed to the creation of an "anomaly detection
statistical learning pipeline" to indicate whether social media information
has been altered.
Quazi told ABC7 News: "I think there’s a
conventional mindset that I’m missing out on childhood, but I don’t think
that’s true. I think, again, that mindset would have me graduating middle
school now."
"It is my dream to have a career tackling
challenging issues and effecting radical innovation in service of the common
good," he wrote in his LinkedIn biography, underlining the achievement of
one of his ambitions.
Quazi made his SpaceX job announcement
before receiving his engineering degree from Santa Clara University, making
him the youngest graduate ever, according to the Seattle Times.
Furthermore,
he intends to relocate from Pleasanton, California, with his mother in order
to begin working at SpaceX in Redmond, Washington.
