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Is 9 years old too young to study electrical engineering?

Apparently not! Just seen this article about a nine year old who is due to complete his electrical engineering degree in December this year. Laurent Simons began his university studies in March this year and has nearly completed the degree course in just nine months. Anyone here wish they could get their head around new topics this quickly? And would you trust a 9 year old, however well qualified, with your wiring?


Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/13/worlds-top-universities-compete-9-year-old-boy-genius/
  • It does beg the question "would his degree be acceptable for CEng is it is not a four year course?"
  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member
    Is it just me that finds the article quite sad - at 9 my big life choices were a skateboard or a BMX bike followed by which colour pop to have with chips


    Regards


    OMS


  • OMS‍ , I know what you mean. but it is a tricky one... If he wasn't being pushed to this level academically, he may have a lot of issues with boredom or behaviour to deal with and I expect his parents and teachers feel a duty to give him all the opportunities they can to explore his full potential. I guess it is better to be stimulated at a level appropriate to your intellect than to your age, as I expect he would be very bored by primary school level work, but it is a lot of pressure on a very young boy. The article says that he has a photographic memory, which may be great for memorising diagrams and equations etc, but may not necessarily translate to real life situations or any grey areas where you may have to compromise in some way to achieve a creative solution to a problem. The article points out that when not studying, he plays computer games like minecraft with his friends, but a lot of that sort of gaming is done online rather than face-to-face, so he may not really be developing the usual social skills that his 9 year old peers will be exploring at this time. I expect that he has probably spent a lot of his life surrounded by adults constantly telling him how special and clever he is, which is obviously true, but not necessarily a strong foundation for developing resilience, which is usually gained not from academic exposure, but by experiencing the usual failures and falling outs that are part and parcel of peer group dynamics growing up.


  • Well I see nothing impossible,  at 9 I could already solder and had a thing for code breaking, but some examples of electronics that still exist suggest that quality control in  my early work was pretty dire.

    However I suspect though this boy will develop like other infant prodigies (anyone else remember   Ruth Lawrence  - age 10 at Oxford in the early 1980s, when the rest of us there were 18 or so..  now a clever adult, but one of many at that level)

    While in effect this lad is working at a level of those a decade older right now,  I expect that in ten years time,  many others of his age will have caught up, and in the meantime, for the reasons OMS alludes, those following at a more conventional pace may well  end up with a more rounded out character.


    I suspect that like the maths genius, the theory and logic part of the brain has switched on earlier than others of the same age, but on its own that faculty makes one only half a person - the rest required to function in society will come later. Or maybe not, as is sometimes the case in some University researchers, as parodied in the comedy ' Big Bang theory', when at least one of the characters can be described as off the normal spectrum, (even for a physicist ? ).

    Do not get me wrong, I wish the boy no ill, and he should certainly keep learning, up to the point he is still enjoying it, but there is more out there to do at that age, that cannot so easily be done later, hopefully he has another 7 decades or so to fill.