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Comment by eddotman | Hacker News Reader

I've hung out with Ahaan at school several times -- some people in the comments here are speculating that going to university this young might make it hard to adjust (socially), but honestly I assumed he was like ~20 (i.e. just like any other college-age dude). I had no clue he had such a neat backstory of how he got to MIT!

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Yeah, there was a guy at my alma mater (Olin College of Engineering) who entered at 14 or 15. He was perfectly normal and well-adjusted. I mean, it was a weird cloistered tech school environment, so "normal" and "well-adjusted" are relative here, but I also didn't realize he was so young until he mentioned it.

I mean, sure, you get the occasional Ted Kaczynski, but the vast majority of kids I've heard of entering college early seem well-adjusted.

> you get the occasional Ted Kaczynski

Occasional? Ted was one of a kind. And apparently, you don't "get" someone like him. Allegedly, rather, you "make" that kind of person through government sponsored psychological torture experiments. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-...

Yes, I was being a little glib when I said that.

That's, unfortunately, who a lot of people automatically jump to when they think of "maladjusted precocious children/young adults" I think there was a RadioLab episode about him as well?

A better example for this crowd would be Hans Reiser, who skipped high school and went straight to UC Berkeley.

When my (then future) wife was in college, there was some controversy about younger women on campus needing to tell guys who were flirting with them how young they were, because guys in their early 20s would occasionally end up asking a girl out and then finding out she was only 16. My wife agreed with this general sentiment, which led to one of her friends saying "you'd think differently if you were 16!" Her response: "maybe, but that's not for another year."

My younger sister was regularly mistaken for a teacher when she was in 7th grade.

I was pretty obviously an immature punk all through high school, but some people are both academically and socially advanced.

Right now, my five year old son with autism is simultaneously learning the toilet and calculus. Who knows where he'll be socially when he's academically ready for college?

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