Move over, Doogie Howser! Jeremy Shuler, a 12-year-old boy from Grand Prairie, Texas, just began his freshman year at Cornell University’s engineering school in Ithaca, New York. Shuler, who has an IQ of 156, is the youngest student the Ivy League institution has on record.
According to the Associated Press, the home-schooled son of two aerospace engineers has been reading books in English and Korean since age 2. Per The Washington Post, when Shuler took the SAT subject tests at 10, he scored better than 99.6 percent of those who took the exam that year. At 11, the prodigy earned his high school diploma from Texas Tech University Independent School District, an online educational program.
When Shuler was 5, he plowed through The Lord of the Rings and Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics without any help. So his mom and dad decided against enrolling him in kindergarten.
“We were concerned about him socializing with other kids,” his mother, Harrey Shuler, told the AP. “At the playground he was freaked out by the other kids running around screaming. But when we took him to Math Circle and math camp, he was very social. He needed someone with similar interests.”
Shuler, who lives off-campus with his parents, told the AP he’s adjusting to college life. “I was nervous at first, but I’m a lot more excited than nervous now,” he revealed. “As Mommy said, all the kids in math camp were older than me, so I’m used to having older friends. As long as they like math.”
He added that classes “are kind of easy so far, but I know they’ll be harder pretty soon.”