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According to a report from Mercury News, a fourteen-year-old child prodigy from California will soon start his first full-time role at SpaceX. Kairan Quazi, the youngest person to graduate from Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, in nearly two hundred years, will make his graduation official soon, and from there, it's off to the stars for him - literally. The child prodigy, a rare example of high intelligence, should join SpaceX's Starlink division after finishing his computer science and engineering studies at the university.
14-Year-Old Child Prodigy Set To Start Corporate Career After Interning At Intel
Quazi's story is quite typical of a child prodigy - children with a remarkable understanding of complex mathematical and problem-solving capabilities that often evade adults. According to Mercury News, KAiran started his collegiate journey at the ripe old age of nine - when most of his peers wondered if there is more to life than figuring out what a quotient is. Initially enrolling at a community college, one of his first corporate roles was as a research collaborator at Intel Corporation's artificial intelligence research lab. Artificial intelligence ranks high in the list of technologies that use complex mathematical and statistical models to leverage existing data's ability to create new insights.
So how smart is he? Well, according to his piece for HuffPost from 2019, he's most likely smarter than you and us. His IQ is higher than 99.9% of the population, making him among the 11 million smartest people in the world out of the eight billion that inhabit the planet.
However, there are some limitations to his mind. For instance, while he can learn advanced concepts without the generally required prerequisites, his ability to verbally reproduce knowledge isn't quite that far ahead. In his HuffPost article from 2019, the child genius explained:
My parents like to say that I literally “Khan Academy’ed” my way into college. But there are other areas where my brain is still catching up, like handwriting, spelling and taking notes. 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. Please wish me luck!
Since he hasn't officially graduated college yet, Kairan's social media doesn't explicitly state that he's about to start working for one of the world's most highly sought-after and competitive workplaces. Due to his age, Intel had to officially designate him as a research collaborator instead of an intern. However, Kairan's Twitter handle does have a rocket emoji next to his job details, so Mercury News' scoop of him landing a job at SpaceX does appear to be in the works at least.
He will work for SpaceX's Starlink division as a software engineer - and since he's too young to live independently, he and his mom will move to Washington for his job. It is extremely hard to get into SpaceX, according to online recruitment services provider Zippia. But, not as hard as it is for an ordinary person to get an IQ score as high as Kairan's. Zippia believes that only 0.2% of all applicants applying to SpaceX get in - or in other words, 99.8% of those that apply are not accepted.
SpaceX is also one of the most demanding employers in the world, and employees are often required to work more than eighty hours a week. Whether a child genius will need the same time to solve numerous challenges at his job is unclear. Washington state's minimum legal working age is 14, and companies are legally required to identify any minors in their workforce. They must also get a minor work permit and a parent authorization form. A school authorization form is also needed for those enrolled in a school. Minors can work eight hours a day in the morning in a nonschool week but are barred from working night shifts in any circumstance.
