11-Year-Old Carson Starts College, Studying to Become a Physicist

Who is Carson Huey-You?

11-year-old Carson Huey-You is the youngest student Texas Christian University has ever had. He was admitted at age 10 and started his freshman year at 11, studying to become a quantum physicist.

"I'm taking calculus, physics, history and religion. Those are my four classes," Carson Huey-You told CBS 11 News.

What makes him a prodigy?

By age two — when most kids are learning to talk in sentences — he was reading chapter books. By age three, he could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. At five, when other children start kindergarten, he entered the eighth grade. He graduated from the Accommodated Learning Academy in Grapevine, Texas, as co-valedictorian with a 4.0 GPA. He also plays classical music on the piano and can speak Mandarin Chinese.

Carson Huey-You scored 1770 on his SAT, with a 620 in math.

"It's fun because it's basically just like high school, but in a big campus… with a lot more people," Carson told CBS 11 News.

His dad, Andre Huey-You, a former pilot, said he never pushed Carson to study so far ahead — in fact, on the contrary, he wanted to hold onto his son's childhood years.

What happened next?

In four or five years — or perhaps much earlier — he would graduate college, possibly getting his college degree before his driver's license.

That's exactly what happened: Carson graduated from TCU on May 13, 2017, with a bachelor's degree in physics (plus minors in mathematics and Mandarin Chinese) at age 14 — the youngest person to graduate from college in the state of Texas. He earned his master's degree in physics at 17, and is pursuing a PhD focused on quantum physics.

CultureMap: TCU admits 11-year-old boy genius

A child like this requires no pushing. Gifted kids need a special environment for an intelligence that is way beyond what any test can measure — and when they get it, they soar.