At an age where teenagers tend to spend copious amounts of time on social media apps, 14-year-old Bangladeshi-American Kairan Quazi became the youngest person on Elon Musk's Space X team as a software engineer.
Moreover, Quazi graduated from Santa Clara University with a bachelor’s degree at 14 and became the youngest graduate in the university’s 172-year history.
The young prodigy took to his LinkedIn, which has since been deleted due to age restrictions, to announce his position on the Space X team.
"Next stop: Space X! I will be joining the coolest company on the planet as a Software Engineer on the Starlink engineering team. One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability."Kairan Quazi on his since-deleted LinkedIn account
Soon, Linkedin deleted the the boy's account because it has a minimum age requirement of 16 years of age for all members, as outlined in their user agreement.
The platform also added that Kairan can rejoin Linkedin once he turns 16. The 14-year-old SpaceX engineer did not appreciate this move and called it "illogical and primitive".
In an interview with USA Today, his mother Julia said, "We (her husband and herself) are elated that he ended up with SpaceX. We know their hiring bar is set really high. Once again, he proved us wrong."
The Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) produces spacecraft, launches rockets, and provides satellite communications. Elon Musk launched the company in 2002 to lower the price of space travel and colonise Mars.
The Young Engineer's Journey
Quite early, it was apparent that Quazi had unique abilities. His mother, Julia told USA Today said that at the age of two, he had already started speaking in whole phrases.
According to The Mercury News, Quazi is qualified as “profoundly gifted,” with an IQ above the 99.9th percentile of the population.
Quazi quickly jumped classes after his paediatrician advised his parents to do so. At age 10, he enrolled in an applied mathematics programme at Las Positas, a community college in Livermore. That same year, he transferred to Santa Clara University (SCU), where he studied computer science and engineering.
At SCU, the young student participated in the Association for Computer Machinery and was also voted as a senior senator in the Associated Student Government. Just a month before his graduation, he landed a job interview with SpaceX and bagged the position of a software engineer.
"I can't believe so many people would want me to be graduating middle school right now. It feels cruel to infantilize my intellectual and emotional needs and demand that I be trapped in a linear environment where the only metric is age."Kairan Quazi in an interview with USA Today
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