Starting college at age twelve

What is it like to be a twelve-year-old pursuing “higher education?” Probably not what you imagine... Here’s a few questions from friends and colleagues, answered a couple of decades after the fact.

“I guess my number one question would be, what is uni like for someone who is in such a high state of cognitive development? Is it different for someone in their early teens as opposed to someone between the ages of 18-25 given the fact that the brain is nearly fully developed for adults?”

I did two degrees, one started while very young and one started at pretty much exactly the “normal age” -- i.e. right when one would traditionally be finishing high school. So, I did get to see it from both perspectives. What I say next is probably somewhat controversial, but I don’t think there was any major difference between my core cognitive development at age twelve, when I started, versus age eighteen when I finished my BSc / started my BA.

Would that apply to your “average” twelve-year-old? Almost certainly not. But, I think we tend to greatly underestimate kids’ abilities to perform academically and socially, and structure our society in such a way that they’re definitely far behind their capabilities in terms of cognitive development.

I may actually delve into all this a lot deeper at some point (it’s a great blog/essay topic), but it’s worth briefly noting there are some persuasive arguments that this sort of 18-25 period of “emerging adulthood” we have is basically just a cultural construction; you can look to other societies and cultures and it’s absent. Similarly, you often find a lot earlier start to “adulthood.”

The other point I would make is that a university environment is probably a much closer analogue to the “real world” than “school” -- e.g. elementary/middle/high school. It is a place of diversity in all aspects. To the extent that we’re trying to produce productive members of society, I think we have a fundamental problem in so far as we’re replicating a very artificial structure. I’d argue we’re intellectually and socially stunting children.

Going back to whether a “typical” twelve-year-old can deal with going to university... Generally, no, but I don’t think it’s anything inherent -- they’re not operating anywhere close to the cognitive capacity they’re capable of. But turn back the clock a bit, to say the “average three-year-old,” or perhaps even the “average six-year-old,” and with the right preconditions I think you can almost certainly mold a child to where they are academically and socially mature enough to not just handle that environment, but to thrive in it.

As for what it’s like at twelve -- it’s incredible. You’re in, as I mentioned, this amazingly diverse environment. You’re surrounded by all sorts of incredible resources, from your instructors/professors, to the library, to fellow students, to really expensive computers. You know it’s altogether different than the experience you’d have in school. You get to explore ideas and you get to learn more and better ways of exploring those ideas. What is it like at eighteen? Still incredible.

“I would be curious to know how you handled [going to college] at such a young age. How did that help you? How did you manage socially, being so young?”

And, someone else asked:

"How did everyone treat you? Were they - the adults in the room - at all taken aback?”

I think the answer to the cognitive development question above helps frame this a bit...

How did it help me? Well, I think it was the ideal environment given my level of cognitive development. By the time I was twelve, it was no secret to those who knew me then that I was “advanced” or “gifted” or whatever the current label is. It allowed me to have the sort of constant academic challenge that I absolutely wanted, but which by that point had exceeded what was possible with conventional homeschooling (or perhaps more accurately “unschooling.”).

As for the social side of it, I didn’t “manage” it, because it never felt as though it was something that had to be managed. I kind of chuckle at the conventional idea of a homeschooler being socially isolated. I’m sure that happens, particularly if there’s a strong religious basis for homeschooling or perhaps in rural environments, but my childhood was anything but socially isolated. My “classroom” was often the real world of Kamloops, which of course is a (small) city. I was certainly not sheltered from the sorts of realities that entails, and I suppose that allows one to be a lot more “mature” socially at a younger age than the norm.

The other consideration is that I was too busy to worry about whether my presence was “abnormal”. University is hard work if one wants to do well. The novelty of this little kid walking around from class-to-class also wears off pretty quickly; it’s not long before you just blend into the milieu that is university. When the “little kid” is in your class, I suppose some people were a bit surprised, but perhaps not as much as one would think. TRU/UCC at the time was small enough that getting used to a little kid being around happened a bit more quickly than it may have elsewhere, too. I of course also did grow, so by the time I was in 3rd/4th year of my BSc, I don’t think it was immediately obvious to those who didn’t know me that I was exceptionally young.

So, regarding others, almost everyone just treated me as what I was; another student. While there’s always a few people who find a way to take other people’s ambitions and life path personally, you deal with that when you have to, and recognize they’re an incredibly small minority. The only real troublemakers in my life at that time were from outside the university. About the only thing I couldn’t do socially was go to the campus pub during my first degree. Drinking age in BC was (and is) 19, so I was too young.

“And I want to know your IQ because I’m nosy?”

I have no idea. I’ve never been formally tested, and I don’t think IQ is a particularly useful number. Emphasizing that, if I had to hazard a guess, and thinking about IQ ranges statistically, and assuming it was some kind of standardized test, it probably would’ve been quite high when I started university. I’d guess around 135, perhaps? Nowadays, it’s highly dependent on sleep and the amount of tea I have consumed.

A related question I’m often asked is, “are you a genius?” That’s actually a complicated question. (Why is nobody surprised I said that?) If it’s about “natural ability,” no, certainly not. I’ll stand corrected if someone cites some good research to the contrary, but I don’t think there’s a lot of genetic variance in intelligence. It’s almost entirely on the “nurture” side of the nature vs. nurture balance.

If “genius” is taken to mean some combination of other things, the answer I suppose is “possibly.” Academically, I did very well in university, and perhaps more significantly, did very well in very different things -- just for the sake of comparison, my grades in upper level Chemistry, for example, were virtually identical to those in psychology or cultural anthropology. “Polymath” feels like a far more accurate term, and it’s one I sometimes use myself.

“Were you scared?”

No. Seriously, not even a little bit. Even in retrospect, there wasn’t anything to be afraid of -- the worst case scenario, I suppose, would’ve been that I did terribly and ended up going back to being homeschooled.

“Did you make any friends that lasted?”

Yes, absolutely! Unfortunately, social networking wasn’t a thing back in those days, so I’ve lost track of a few people. (Hey, if you know me, connect!) But yes, quite a number of friends who I still keep in touch with.

“Are you only book smart?”

Well, Wikipedia defines “book smart” as….

Nah. Just looking at what I majored in -- Computer Science -- “There was already a fairly heavy focus on applied knowledge in Computer Science in the late 90s, so professionally-speaking even, you couldn’t be just “book smart” to do well. In a more general sense, once you’ve met a sociopath or two in life and survive, you’re way past book smart.

“Do you have issues forming relationships? How did that impact your friendships (at 12) and now?”

No; I think the types of relationships people have tend to be flexible. You relate to a 3-year-old in a different way than an adult, for example. Other than being accelerated, I don’t think there’s anything particularly different about my cognitive or social development. In terms of friendships, I tend to gravitate towards people of similar intellect. When younger, that meant my close friends tended to be a bit older.

“When did you know you were an exceptional learner?”

Quite early. Others of course recognized it sooner. For example, I could read numbers off of my baby bottle at around nine months old. I also don’t remember a time when I was unable to read words. I think I really started to realize I was “advanced” when I spent a few weeks in Grade 3 in public school, and had zero difficulties with any of the reading from my own grade level (nor those several higher). Mathematically, I was also capable of doing work several grade levels above that. So, for others, infancy, for myself, probably around 8-years-old.

The underlying point here, though, is that none of that reflects natural abilities -- they’re the result of learning facilitated by an excellent educator, my mother, who accurately understood that kids are capable of learning “advanced” things far earlier than most believed then (and that most believe now). Reading is one example (and perhaps the most important one, given that it’s a foundational skill).

“If you were homeschooled then how did your parents know that you were a genius? Also, do you think being homeschooled helped or hindered your learning?”

Well, I’m the “baby” in the family by a fair bit, so that helped I suppose in terms of direct comparisons academically. As for homeschooling, that’s what it was called back in the day. My academic path, especially in the last couple of years before I went to university, was very similar to what one would now call “unschooling” in that it was often self-directed and flexible.

Regardless of the term, though, there’s absolutely no way I would have had the academic and social development necessary for university had I spent much time in the traditional school system.

“Was any of it easy? What was the most difficult part?”

Academically speaking, like any degree program, some things are easier than others. I think like most people, I probably put a bit more effort into courses I was more interested in, and maybe that biases my perspective a bit. I was always intellectually challenged. I also didn’t shy away from taking challenging courses, and purposely selected courses that I knew would be challenging.

The biggest academic surprise, I suppose, was the leap from high school level to university-level math when I was 14. Calculus, for example is hard, and there’s not a lot of time to learn it well when it’s just one of the five courses (plus lab work in three of them) that you’re doing in 1st year. If my recollection and arithmetic is correct, us 1st year BSc students were doing about 28 hours of classroom time per week including labs. The difficulty increased again in 2nd year, particularly as I had a lot more math to think about and try to synthesize. In just 2nd year, I took Multivariable Calculus, Linear Algebra, Statistics, Discrete Mathematics, and Differential Equations. That was certainly the most difficult academically.

"Why did you pick Computer Science as a degree?"

For so many reasons! I suppose to simplify it though, anything to do with “computers” and “computation” was fascinating, rapidly developing, entailed great career prospects, also entailed great academic prospects if I wanted to continue beyond a Bachelor's degree, and fit very well for a young kid with an entrepreneurial spirit. It was not my only academic love, though -- I strongly considered switching Majors to Chemistry after 1st year. In the end, I stuck with CS, and took as much Chemistry as I could fit as electives (almost enough for a Minor).

My “horizons” broadened more when I did my BA, and discovered other intellectually appealing things far outside the physical and mathematical sciences, such as political science and cultural anthropology.