As most kids his age mess around with their friends, play mindless video games, and prepare to enter high school, a 14-year-old child prodigy named Kairan Quazi is starting his job as a software engineer for SpaceX’s Starlink project.
Quazi explained his beyond-his-years capabilities during an appearance on “The Claman Countdown,” a Fox Business show, on Wednesday, saying, “I was speaking in full sentences at age two. I started doing programming at seven, and I was reading complicated books. I remember I was just six or seven, I think, and my parents took me to Barnes & Noble and I really wanted to buy a pre-calc book.”
Quazi then added that his advanced reading and mathematics levels helped him get through his advanced math courses when he started taking courses at a community college when he was just nine years old, saying, “That was one of my first exposures to very advanced math. And, unbeknownst to them, I did learn from it. And so that really helped when I started community college at age nine.”
That community college was Livermore, California’s Las Positas College. It let him enroll when he was just nine and he attended it for two years before transferring to Santa Clara University. Once there, he studied both computer science and engineering before graduating as the university’s youngest-ever graduate.
Surprisingly, Quazi said that he felt natural at college and was able to make friends with the older students and some of his professors. Surprisingly for a school in California, he said that he did not have to censor himself and was able to be himself around his circle of friends there. In his words:
“It really feels natural, like I’m with people that I can completely be myself around. I don’t have to censor my speech or conversations. I’m also very active on campus, and I’m lucky to be embraced by a lot of very close friends, which does include a few professors.”
He also said that attending the normal school system was “intellectually painful” for him due to how far behind his learning his peers were, even if he enjoyed some of the activities like recess that were meant fo kids his age. He said: “My experience in traditional schools was a slow suffocation for me. It was physically, emotionally and intellectually painful for me to sit in the classroom for days and months and eventually, years on end, not learning at an appropriate pace for me. And while I did look forward to recess and spending time with friends and of course, my daily trip to the principal’s office, it was very painful.”
But, now that’s over because he’s working at SpaceX on Starlink, which is intellectually stimulating for even the brightest. Commenting on getting to work at Starlink even after nearly 100 other companies rejected him, probably because of his young age, Quazi said, “My journey was not easy. Both due to my circumstances and biases as well as market timing. I received 95 rejections, two offers that were placed on hiatus, and then finally three offers, one of which was SpaceX.”
He added that the interview process worked out for him as it’s about capability rather than “fit” or credentials, saying, “I heard a lot about the SpaceX interview process being among the most difficult of any companies. I think it takes up something like what, 0.2% of applicants? But it turns out that their interview philosophy, which heavily focuses on wide-ranging technical skills and the ability to think under pressure, really suits my background. I had something like ten interview rounds across various different formats. But they were a lot of fun for me.”
That makes sense for Musk, who is known to care far more about capability than personality or where someone went to school.
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