Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15

I applaud this family, and am glad for Ahaan&#x27;s sake that he isn&#x27;t just shipping himself off to college, but is going to still have his support structure.<p>I was homeschooled, along with my two sisters, my entire educational career until college. We all started taking college classes early, my older sister correspondence at 14, my twin and I correspondence at 15. All of us took classes at local colleges before starting &#x27;real college&#x27;. All of us scored high on our ACTs, all of us got scholarships to college.<p>My parents didn&#x27;t really push us, we were just smart. We had childhoods, I was a starter on the basketball team, and played college soccer for a year. I also read 10+ books a week, played way, way too much Civilization and Total Annihilation, and did plenty of volunteer work, especially at our local public access station.<p>For my sisters, going to and living at &#x27;real college&#x27; worked out well, they both succeeded in their own ways (my older sister graduated with two masters a few days after she turned 21, my twin sister received a lot of recognition from professionals in her field before graduating, was salutatorian, etc), whereas I didn&#x27;t do so well being away from home and the support structure. I&#x27;m lazy, and I thought could just not do assignments I didn&#x27;t want to and do well enough on other assignments to make up for it. Long story short, my GPA dropped enough to lose my scholarship, and I decided that the private college experience wasn&#x27;t worth borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for.<p>So I moved home, finished my bachelors from the state university in town. Snagged an internship and then got a job offer from that company, essentially during my junior year for a full time job, contingent on finishing school.<p>My point in typing up this story is not to say that I am or was awesome. My point is that I am pretty sure that Ahaan Rungta is a pretty smart kid, his parents probably pushed him less than you think, and that as long as he and his family figure out how to navigate the maturity journey, he&#x27;ll be fine.

I went to college early (14, graduated 18). I&#x27;ve spoken with a lot of similar folks over the years, and the biggest takeaway for me was that everyone&#x27;s experience and needs were different.<p>Some people were pushed by their parents, but mostly it was people who were bored with the normal experience and found an out. Out of that set, maybe about half regret it, and wished they had slowed down and enjoyed high school&#x2F;childhood more.<p>People tend to assume that folks who go to college early would be socially awkward, but that was not my experience. The social&#x2F;emotional intelligence distribution was pretty normal.<p>Out of everything, the common denominator was supportive parents.

Children can do a lot more than they&#x27;re given credit for. My 4-year-old demanded music lessons when his older brother was playing cello. He started on both cello and piano.<p>Entering kindergarden, in music class the teacher had a keyboard, asked the children who could play. A little girl banged out chopsticks. Another little boy picked out twinkle,twinkle,little star. My son Andrew raised his hand, and played some Beethoven sonata. The teacher asked him if he knew what that was. He told her.<p>He&#x27;s not a prodigy. Has terrible handwriting! The 1st-grade evaluation suggested he had fine-motor issues. Yet he could play 64th-note runs on the piano endlessly. Its all because of regular teaching and fun practicing.<p>Kids can learn what they put their minds to. But it takes 10,000 hours not only from the pupil but from the tutor. My wife put in the time; Andrew plays wonderfully.

I&#x27;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!

I consider 4 years of my highschool a complete waste of time and would have loved to jump straight into a university right after elementary school. It would have been great to have OCW available at that time and not having to do everything myself including finding relevant books&#x2F;sources.<p>Good for Ahaan he escaped it and I wish him the very best of luck @ MIT!

It would be interested to check in with him at 35 to see where he ended up compared to other &#x27;normal&#x27; 35 year old MIT grads. Basically does pushing your kid like that from such and early age lead to any significant long term advantages.

MIT has always had a few of these &quot;show pony&quot; geniuses around. Two of them sadly committed suicide during my years at MIT. I dont know their minds, but I guess some of their sense of self worth was being a smart ass and marching to to a different drummer. When you are surrounded by thousands almost as smart as you you dont really stand out for being you anymore. MIT people are impresses by you doing something really clever. Also I suspect these guys were very lonely too. I hope Adaan has a sense of self worth built on more than being at MIT.

Some commenters are afraid this kid was pushed way too hard and did not have time to learn proper social skills, play sports, get a holistic education in the humanities.<p>This all might be true but the article makes it very clear how precocious this kid is. I don&#x27;t think his parents were trying to push him. If anything they seemed to struggle to get him the things that he needed to succeed.<p>Some people are just so laser focused on their desires that you just have to let them do their thing. I&#x27;m sure if he wants to play sports or learn history, he&#x27;ll excel at it too.

As long as he did not exclusively learn technical stuff but also got a humanistic education, which we do not know, and enjoyed his childhood, which I think he did, because you cannot perform like that without enjoying it, I think this is pretty amazing parenting.<p>You could find other reasons to nitpick (Did he do sports? Did he develop social competences by interacting with other kids?), but even if these things are true, which we do not know, there are children, who got a regular education, that are still lacking in these regards and they are not enrolled at MIT at 15.

So many people praising this brainwashing I can&#x27;t even believe it. I&#x27;m ready for the downvote but please comment to why it is not the case. That&#x27;s a pretty story but if their parents went on teaching him something else than physics everybody would go on their horses and scream for child abuse.<p>What choice did the kid have? None. Dude didn&#x27;t go out and was full MIT mode from the age of 5.

It is better for the kids to praised about what they are doing rather than what they are getting. Personally, I don&#x27;t care what prestigious thing he got. This kid is amazing for having studied so many things on his own.<p>The real aim here should be to be engaged and to be learning; which are things this kid seems to be have done plenty of. It is so cool that we now have all these learning resources accessible easily.<p>It&#x27;s interesting how this kind of thing makes one think about their own life. I went to a talk by a computer scientist yesterday. He is studying cryptography. You could tell that he was so engaged, getting so much joy from his subject. People were interested in what he was explaining. You could tell that he is just loving every minute of his job. This is the kind of engagement level I am looking for. And by the way, I don&#x27;t think one needs to be top-level at what they do to get there.

Don&#x27;t know this kid, or this situation, but to commenters here who seem envious, or young people who are inspired: being a child prodigy expires at age 25. Being known for your youth means that once you aren&#x27;t young anymore you&#x27;ve lost that. If your identity is wrapped up in being precocious be ready with a second plan.

&quot;When Rungta turned 12, his family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, as his parents realized he needed to be in a more intellectually stimulating environment.&quot;<p>My friends in Fort Lauderdale are gonna LOVE this!

I envy this guy so much! I felt delayed by school, which offered slow-paced, and uninspiring environment (learning interesting stuff on my own, after the lessons; at ~15 I started reading academic textbooks in physics and chemistry).<p>Right now I am very much for adjusting education to students, rather than the other way around (without expecting that everyone gets magically enlightened at the age of 18-19). Especially as the cohort-based learning is a direct heritage of the Prussian education (for teaching soldiers, not - scientists or engineers).

I don&#x27;t know man, I think there&#x27;s something to be said about having a childhood. Being from India myself, I know the tremendous pressure parents put on kids to succeed. I hope that this kid wasn&#x27;t subject to the same.

<i>“I will never forget the feeling of walking into the lobby of Building 7, looking up, and then touching the pillars to see if they were real. I couldn’t believe I was at MIT. My life and my ambitions moved to another level at that moment.”</i><p>I think this impressive achievement is more a testament to the role that aspirations acquired during childhood play in determining a person&#x27;s success than it is a reflection of this young man&#x27;s intelligence. Yes, the latter is necessary, but it isn&#x27;t sufficient. I have little doubt that there are many 18 year olds entering MIT&#x27;s class of 2019 who could have entered at 15 had they been provided a similarly advantageous upbringing.<p>These stories attract the attention of some of us because we wish we had been raised similarly. Had we not devoted our attention as children to, say, petty family turmoil or a hedonistic preoccupation with computer games, perhaps we would have progressed through life with a singularity of purpose and self-confidence that would have situated us in a better position today. We might have been spared years in our teens and twenties trying to find a sense of meaning in our work, unlike this fellow, who seems to have it figured out.<p>I won&#x27;t speculate about his social skills. I&#x27;ve met college students his age running the gamut from borderline autistic to social butterfly. Yes, the sense of &quot;peerlessness&quot; must be a bit alienating, but many of us have had this experience without leapfrogging high school.

&quot;two-year-old son — already an avid reader&quot; sounds somewhat unusual?

What I like is he came to America to go to MIT. That great mind is now an American mind, and with his family origin, I would hope a world thinking and sympathetic mind. Perhaps he can do good in this world.

The school system is really best for the kids-in-the-middle, i.e. not the best fit for the really talented, as the case with this MIT kid here, neither is it for the D&#x2F;F students. Public school was originated in Europe for training workers if memory serves me right.<p>Since Bush the public education system is more geared towards to the D&#x2F;F students nonetheless, i.e., the no child left behind policy, a road to hell. This might have something to do with Bush, who is about a D student himself.<p>A solution I would like to see, is tax-relief for home-schooling families, they don&#x27;t use the public education system so why pay for the school district property tax? This looks like a win-win for the family and the nation in the long run.<p>Human races compete and evolve, focusing on the left-behinders are so against nature, yes they should be taken care of, but the focus really should be on the other side.

This seems to have been drawn from the same statistical distribution of many stories that center around this idea that &quot;MIT students are smarter than students anywhere.&quot; The ideology of MIT is that you should go to MIT daycare, then MIT kindergarten and all the way through to the PhD and beyond, and if they had enough people in that pipeline they wouldn&#x27;t bother taking applications from anywhere else.<p>That idea is definitely one of the things holding Boston back in terms of startups -- you definitely see research labs at MIT that don&#x27;t hire postdocs from Stanford or Cornell because they only want to hire MIT people. There are plenty of MIT grads who are mediocre at best but many local startups (particularly those started by MIT grads) don&#x27;t realize this and often make up all sorts of excuses about why things went wrong.

&gt;Some people think I’m gifted, but I don’t think so<p>Taking physics and chemistry classes at 5 years old? Call me crazy, but I think that can certainly be considered gifted by most standards.

Their restaurant (Cafe Spice @ MIT) is pretty good!

I did my bachelor&#x27;s from ages 14-18; there&#x27;s some things that you can&#x27;t really do (frat parties) but most of the social opportunities are open to you. It helps to make friends if you are in a group-centric major - I was a chemist, so lots of long hours in the lab with cool people. There&#x27;s been some questions about whether the parents push too hard in these sorts of cases; for me, I was definitely motivated more by my own desire to get out in the world and start getting real things done. This isn&#x27;t always a productive desire - I wish I&#x27;d taken the time to learn more about the stuff that grew to interest me later (math&#x2F;CS), instead of blitzing through all my chem requirements. I guess for other people doing the same thing the only advice I&#x27;d have is that while the cliche is that life is short, it&#x27;s really longer than you think it is at that age and you shouldn&#x27;t feel like you need to rush in order to maintain a position in some sort of race. It&#x27;s not bad to progress fast, just make sure it isn&#x27;t at the expense of finding what you really love to do.

I&#x27;d be willing to bet that Rungta watched and consumed with great joy Walter Lewin&#x27;s Physics 8.01 videos. I&#x27;d further bet that he mentioned them in this interview with MIT News, only to have his comments omitted from the piece, because Lewin is, in MIT&#x27;s eyes, <i>persona non grata</i>. Of course this is just conjecture. I just said I&#x27;d be willing to take the bet.

I find his drive and his parent&#x27;s support commendable. Being someone who has not been homeschooled and does not know anyone who has, I am extremely curious about it.<p>-How does one go about replicating this kind of success? Or even moderate success. In typical schools, you have some measure of whether your child is &quot;succeeding&quot;. How does one go about doing the same for home-schooled children.<p>-How do you go about providing the structure that schools provides towards increasingly complex material which will keep the child engaged and learning at the same time.<p>Not having children myself but watching my brother&#x27;s children, I can see that the structure provided for children is extremely important, even for simple things like when to have food, go to bed, practice music etc.<p>Are there any good resources for raising home schooled children and providing structure?

I plan on doing something like this for my kids as they get older. I already randomly watch open courseware type stuff offered from various universities and I&#x27;ve always noticed they have decent seeming English and Math sections too. So why not sit my kids in front of it too?<p>I don&#x27;t think anyone is really happy with public schools these days. I object because of a Christian background. Yet my non-church going (atheist?) in-laws asked me once about &quot;non-religious&quot; based home school programs for their kids since they knew I would be home schooling. I really had no idea what to tell them.

Even with all the positive support from parents this kid is an extreme outlier.<p>Terrence Tao supposedly knew numbers from Sesame Street at age 2, but I do not know of any avid kid readers at age 2.<p>I know plenty of kids ages 3-4 who know the alphabet but none are actual readers.<p>In fact I know plenty of kids who &quot;read&quot; a book at age 3, but they are not reading the way we adults are they are imitating the reading process.<p>Anecdotally I was a relatively early reader at age 5 (reading whole scary Grimm&#x27;s tales) but my mom keeps insisting it was age 3 when I know it was not.<p>So if he really was reading at age 2 and half that is showing advanced potential.

I think this was a great story and I hope to hear more like it. It has been one of the &quot;promises&quot; of the Internet that smart children could get access to as much learning as they can handle, breaking the bottleneck that was the availability of local resources.<p>Of course not everyone cares, or wants to learn all they can, but for those who do it is important to give them that opportunity. And it is in that context that I think the availability of course ware will help us guide smart, motivated, kids before their boredom leads them into an ill advised adventure.

This is awesome. As someone who can&#x27;t wait to graduate college so I can teach myself stuff through OCW (there&#x27;s some irony there), I am glad it&#x27;s available. It&#x27;s a really great project.

I would love some guidance on how to take advantage of OCW w&#x2F; my kids.<p>I don&#x27;t want to reproduce Ahaan&#x27;s story. My father was a biology teacher and always had tons of text books we could just kind of grind through growing up. I&#x27;m not doing the same for my kids at this time- mostly for lack of resources.<p>Just skimming through the OCM content- I don&#x27;t see material in physics or science that can be used to introduce kids to the scientific method. It mostly looks like baptism by fire.<p>Any tips?

Truly impressive accomplishment. My congratulations.<p>And now imagine that you actually <i>do not need</i> MIT. In comparison to what you have done, it is another rigid institution with a more or less rigid structure.<p>I hope the educational landscape will keep changing, giving more alternative bodies to aquire high end knowledge, e.g. through hacker spaces, virtual&#x2F;internet based platforms, etc.

Some people force maturing, when maturing comes on its own... And by doing so they loose childhood, which never comes back.

&lt;blockquote&gt;&quot;elementary and secondary education from OpenCourseWare&quot;&lt;&#x2F;blockquote&gt;<p>How do you do that?

The main argument for why this ok seems to be:<p>&quot;Children are able to learn more, therefore any obsessively accelerated curriculum is justified even if it detracts from other aspects of child hood&quot;<p>Um, I think that&#x27;s just an excuse for not learning as an adult and pushing your own failed dreams on your offspring.

I just don&#x27;t understand how a 5 year old can comprehend a college level course.<p>How does he know enough math to follow along any scientific course? How can he be well enough versed in literature to follow along a liberal arts course, or history to comprehend a sociology course?

He seems to have tremendous breadth of curiosity, it will be interesting to see what he ultimately ends up specializing in. MIT is a big place, and trying to &quot;major in everything&quot; will almost certainly not turn out well.

If you&#x27;re skeptical about pushing children towards their limits, here&#x27;s another take by Derek Sivers:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sivers.org&#x2F;kimo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sivers.org&#x2F;kimo</a>

Sees the world in buckyballs. Never played with an actual ball.

His parents are amazing. If he&#x27;s like most 15 year olds he won&#x27;t realize that, but when he will it&#x27;ll be quite a moment.<p>That took a lot of courage. Props.

On a side note, I am very curious how family immigrate to US. From what I know there is no good path as Indian to immigrate legally.<p>Green card has 6 - 12 years of wait.

To me, this exemplifies the true potential of online education: not to lift the masses, but to enable the geniuses.

I wonder what he does after school. Impressive accomplishment! That&#x27;s a lot of focus for a kid.

I&#x27;d love to see a list of the order in which each class was provided to the child.

How do you get &quot;elementary and secondary education from OpenCourseWare&quot;?

I remember him from Brilliant.org, saw him solving problems there.

<i>reads article about unbelievably driven and hard working young person</i><p><i>watches video of American students at Yale yelling about safe spaces</i><p>o_o

And then people wonder why there&#x27;s a teenager suicide epidemic in Palo Alto and Silicon Valley in general...