She isn't old enough to buy an alcoholic drink at her local bar, but Alia Sabur can do something no other 19-year-old in the world can do. The former child prodigy, clarinet maestro, black belt martial artist and budding scientist has been named the world's youngest professor.
Miss Sabur has been begin teaching physics at Korea's Konkuk University since last year, breaking a record set by Scottish mathmetician Colin Maclaurin three centuries ago, reports the Times. However, the achievement will come as little surprise to her friends and family. Miss Sabur has been exceeding expectations since infanthood.
She gained a university graduate by 10, a masters at 17 and managed to squeeze in becoming a concert clarinetist with the Rockland Symphony Orchestra - aged 11. Miss Sabur says her secret is curiosity.
"I just wanted to know how things worked," she told the paper.
"My parents encouraged me in anything I wanted to do."
But her gift is not without its drawbacks. By five she had outgrown her friends and moved on to secondary school, where her intellect singled her out as a misfit. When she went to Stony Brook University in New York aged 10, she took her teddy bears to physics classes.
Although the undergraduate students were much older than her, Sabur tells they treated her "kind of as a mascot - they were wonderfully accepting".
"I never tried to be their friend and hang out with them. I had friends always of my own age, so I considered them as classmates and colleagues of a sort but I never socialised with them - that would have been too weird."
Looking back, all of five years, she says Stony Brook was a great place to be, rather than in middle school where she might have been ostracised or made to conform to the views of her classmates. Instead, she spent her fifth, sixth and seventh grades - when all of her friends were still at school - in college, years when young people are often criticised by their peers and made to feel they have to dress and behave in certain ways.
"Obviously, college students, and physics and maths majors, pretty much do their own thing and they didn't have any problems with anything I might have thought of doing. I became self-confident and never had any doubt about my interests, whether what I did was right or wrong or whether it was OK for a girl to be a physical scientist - they were never doubts that occurred to me."
She says her mother, a television reporter, and her electrical engineer father helped her with whatever she wanted to do. Yet she notes that many girls are discouraged earlier on at school from studying maths or science and once they reach college, "the damage has been done and it's too late to reverse it".
"My four years at Stony Brook were probably the best academic experience I've had; I had world-class professors, I was at an age when my eyes were wide open to learning, I still have that excitement and fascination, I still love learning, but it's different to when you are 10 years old... and I suddenly had the world open to me and everything was available."
Sabur then went on to Philadelphia's Drexel University where she earned an MSc and a PhD in materials science and engineering. She became the youngest academic to receive fellowships and awards from the US Department of Defense, NASA, the National Science Foundation and a government scheme called Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need.
"Grad school was much more serious and intense and I'm glad I was accepted although I don't think my acceptance had anything to do with my age and was more to do with my accomplishments and my very strong GPA as an undergraduate. I don't think anyone bent any rules or provided any extra support, except for my parents giving me moral and parental support. My mother would give me a candy bar before I took a test and make me go to sleep on time..."
Keeping bright sparks alight
The appointment of Alia Sabur, the world's youngest professor, raises questions about how other highly intelligent children can be helped to achieve their potential. Take as an example, the case of Thomas Carlyle, who grew up to become the famous Scottish writer and essayist. At the age of 11 months, he was supposed never to have uttered a word until one day, hearing another child crying in the house, he looked up at his nurse and inquired: "What ails wee Jock?"
Given that most young children only begin to use single words about the age of one and do not even put two words together for another year, little Thomas had provided a clear indication that here was a gifted child indeed. Those characteristics of a precocious vocabulary, social maturity, advanced curiosity, impressive memory, along with sympathy and concern for others, are said to be typical of exceptional children. In the case of Carlyle and Alia Sabur, their talents were recognised and nurtured so they flourished.
Both were lucky. Psychologists estimate that about 2% of children are gifted or talented and that perhaps another 3% have abilities that go unrecognised. That would mean the world has more than 100 million children who are unusually able, children with intellectual or other gifts that set them apart from the norm. Their contributions to the future of humanity could be enormous but unfortunately for many of them, poverty, war, disease and even school contribute to dousing the bright sparks.
Being too clever by half, in fact, is often a handicap in the western classroom or the school yard where high intelligence attracts the sort of scorn children tend to reserve for the maimed, migrants or anyone else who seems to be different from the crowd. Nicknames such as 'professor', 'egghead', 'walking dictionary' and other more pejorative terms are common.
"Their brains are loads too heavy for some of them to carry," says a parent of a gifted child. "And sometimes they disguise their abilities to escape the ridicule of their peers."
Alia Sabur had a lot of help from her family, her teachers and her lecturers in achieving the potential she was born with. In one sense she represents a beacon for the parents of bright children everywhere - and their teachers. As critics of the way the needs of the cleverest children are often ignored point out, schools should acknowledge the wide diversity of skills, abilities and learning styles that exist among their students and help parents and teachers with programmes that develop all their talents.
Such programmes should extend from kindergarten through school and on to further education colleges and the universities. Certainly at the tertiary level, there is work to be done with many teacher education courses to better prepare new teachers for the demands gifted children make on them. How to kick children along without knocking them down is a challenge for pedagogues yet people such as Alia Sabur show the social benefits that can come from succeeding at that task.
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