A 14-year-old child prodigy from the East Bay is about to graduate from Santa Clara University, and he already has a job lined up at SpaceX.
On Saturday, Kairan Quazi of Pleasanton will be among 1,600 students graduating from Santa Clara, and he's not even old enough to drive yet. Kairan will be the youngest graduate at the South Bay university and arguably one of the smartest.
Kairan is said to have an IQ ranked in the top one-tenth percentile of the general population while most of his peers just graduated from middle school. He will receive a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Santa Clara and almost immediately begin his career at one of the country’s top space companies.
Kairan's parents told NBC Bay Area he was speaking full sentences at just 2 years old. At 9, his parents had him tested and found him to be profoundly gifted.
Get top local stories in DFW delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC DFW's News Headlines newsletter.
"At a very early age he was recognizing advanced mathematical models that I was very impressed with," Kairan's father said. "I didn't have a point of reference, so I thought OK this is normal."
But it wasn’t. At age 10, a pediatrician recommended Kairan start college to keep up with his accelerated learning.
"As he was getting older, we realized that we were fully outmatched in trying to keep up then with the pace of his accleration and the pace of his processing skills," Kairan's dad said.
After one year at Las Positas College in Livermore, Kairan transferred to Santa Clara University, and three years later, he is graduating with an engineering degree and has landed a job as a software engineer for SpaceX, a company with an acceptance rate of less than 1%.
"There’s this conventional belief that I'm missing out on some sort of noble vision of childhood, but I'm really here to tell people that's not true," Kairan said. "Outside of academics, I have a fairly normal life."
Kairan's mother Jullia added: "We know this path invites a lot of vitriole online, but we try to keep our head in the long game -- what does Kairan want to do."
Kairan will soon relocate to Seattle to start his new job in which he’ll be working on the company's Starlink satellite internet service. He says he’s really excited about the future applications of satellite technology and the further advancement of what he calls the democratization of access to communications.
"My journey wouldn’t have been possible without people in influential positions looking past my age and looking instead at my abilities and my achievements," Kairan said. "So I want to pay that forward in my career."
