Speaking as someone who went to university at 13: Socially I fit in better with my intellectual peers than my chronological peers. Which isn't to say that I fit in well... but at least there was a level of mutual respect. Few educators appreciate the social distance created by a large IQ gap, probably because they haven't experienced it themselves.

The odds that an 18-22yo traditional college student will overlook a 5-9 year age gap because you share a lot of interests and can have interesting conversations are much higher than the odds that another 13yo will overlook the fact that you have no shared interests at all because hey, you're the same age.

I found it extremely difficult to make friends until I got out from under the limiting influence of my parents who didn't want their kid to be "weird."

Now I have a whole bunch of weird friends who are fascinating, joyful dorks, so it's not hopeless either way, but I'd have loved to experience this much sooner.

I see both as same odds - mainly zero.

A lot of people ITT who are like, “I’m so high IQ - I went to college when I was 13” like many of us out here didn’t have that option. (Rubs very much the same way of r/iamverysmart) It’s not as difficult as people make it sound. Most of your education growing up is a complete joke - it’s just babysitting. Exclaiming that you were some version of detective Conan is also quite cringe.

He seems to think his parents made the right choice. I wanted to confirm that I thought the choice my parents made was the wrong one.

You can read bragging into it if you really want, but it's extrinsic to the conversation.

1) Doesn't have very many friends

2) Which doesn't give many opportunities to practice social interactions

Which sort of cycles back on itself. It's hurting them a lot more than it's hurting you.

Society could use a lot more empathy.

Also the source of one of those amusing HN exchanges where people think everyone else is run of the mill. You know the one.

Idk why people on HN assume this is the first time I’ve had to deal with a Putnam winner (or a fields medalist), a celebrity, a billionaire, etc. I live in SV after all. I’ve talked to all of these folks many times. I talk to this person no different than any of the other people I’ve talked to. They deserve no different when they say such things. I judge what they say and are actively doing - not what past accomplishments they have made in some unrelated field.

That's not really what he said at all. He said he fit in somewhat better with his intellectual peers than with his age cohort. There's nothing really controversial about that at all. Most people prefer the company of those with whom they share common intellectual pursuits and viewpoint over those for whom their only common factor is age. Often physical and mental age councide but when they don't, it doesn't seem unreasonable that common mentality would be a stronger bond.

And even if the sentiment were elitist (which I dispute) I don't think I'm the context of this discussion, it deserves a hostile response. I appreciate the individual sharing his personal experience, even if I wouldn't qualify as the type of person he'd share a beer with.

Whatever. Essentially, I like this guy's software and he seems fairly personable, so I'm inclined to not really believe he's "I'm so much smarter than you"ing a bunch of people.

I'm not that smart compared to the other people you replied to but smart is relative. I chose to go to the 3rd best high school in my mediocre Romanian town and had the highest entry grade in the entire high school. When it came to math I would grok the concepts by simply reading on my own 30 minutes before class while my peers would need tutors and still not get it.

Do you think I had a good time in high school? What my peers lacked in math skill they gained in ego preservation. They saw intelligence as a threat that must be neutralized. I doubt my story is that different. I'm telling you this because it's pretty obvious you did not live it so you might gain some empathy and let go of your resentment

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Alas, only once.

You seem to have read it as some kind of bragging, but I see no reason to interpret it that way.

I think the odds are honestly in better favor of the 13YO. if only because a 5 year age gap for an 18 YO is a magnitude different than a 5 year age gap for a 30 year old, or even a 24 year old.

It may even be a legal risk depending on the profiling of each peer for the former. Of no fault of either party, just of the fault of decades of bad actors and a culture highlighting them.

I have a lot of friends and coulleages like that now, but I can't imagine them even giving me the time of day if we met a decade prior and somehow all had identical interests.

I do think listening to any of the professional educators who unanimously and repeatedly told my parents it would have been better to accelerate my path through school would have been a good idea.

Do you have any experience with folks who went to secondary education early? Because I was miserable in high school bored out of my mind and left 1 year only and my only regret was not leaving even earlier like some of my peers did. Speaking platitudes like "the grass is always greener" may make you feel better but it doesn't line up with 25% of the profiles of students I've seen go to secondary education early (and I know a lot of them).

I did hang out with a 15-year-old at college and he seemed to have a relatively normal college experience.

Personally I had a 2 year gap between high school and university, so I went from being one of the youngest in my year to one of the oldest,which was kinda nice. Plus the time away taught me some self reliance so college was pretty easy to adjust to.

So yes, in the modal case (advancing with the cohort) a student entering college will start at 17 years old if their birthday is late in the year.

A few genuine questions.

Have you found the gap to be self-imposed (the kind where you struggle to keep a conversation going with a stupid person) or is the result of projection by your peers (where they feel uncomfortable having you around because you are smarter, and that makes them insecure about themselves)?

Is the social distance visible only in domains where you have devoted time to excelling in, or do you experience it in domains outside your expertise / in random conversions too ?

Do you think you benefitted from jumping to university so soon in life ?

A lot of the difficulty came down to a lack of shared concepts. To me, partial derivatives are very natural concepts and I would get a few sentences into describing something in terms of partials before I remembered that I was talking to people who didn't even know what those were. (Ditto for differential equations, vector spaces, orthogonality...). Over the years I've learned to a limited extent how to convey ideas without drawing on terminology which most people aren't familiar with, but that has taken decades of practice.

I absolutely benefited from going to university early -- and I also benefited from staying in school. I only finished high school a year early, but spent 4 years taking high school and university courses concurrently. While I gained very little socially from high school, I had a couple excellent teachers there and learned some useful material in other subjects. I've met people who dropped out of high school to attend university full time who struck me as shockingly ignorant of e.g. history.

This is an interesting complaint. I would argue that everyone whose knowledge of history consists of the entirety of their high school curriculum, with nothing forgotten, is shockingly ignorant of history.

After reading one relatively short book on the history of China, ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465015808/ ), I had a Chinese high school student remark to me on how unusual it was for her to find someone who could talk about Chinese history. But I was meeting only the lowest possible bar.

If someone is shockingly ignorant of history, that's not because they missed high school; it's a problem that high school doesn't try to address and isn't intended to.

A low bar but certainly not the lowest possible bar.

This is something you should - uh - think about.

I mean this honestly. Being able to convey ideas to many people of different backgrounds is a skill and an intellectual pursuit. If you’re incapable of talking to people except in nerd shit - you’re not really any smarter or whatnot than them. You’re just insular.

This is exactly my point, and why University was a far better social experience for me than high school.

    You’re just insular

    you’re not really any smarter

God damn. So cringe. I say this as someone who also studied math and got his degree in it. Incredibly cringe.

Indeed, and that is totally okay for a 13 year old to have limits. You can't expect a kid to have any real maturity. People only really get good at communicating with age, and even then it is hard.

I think this is one of the most remarkable lifeskills to have. Personally, I feel stupid when I find myself between a jargon laced conversation. On the other hand, I respond very well to clearly communicated (not ELI5, but simple) ideas.

Putting things across as simply as possible is very difficult to master IMO.

It's amazing how many conversations you can have about interesting subjects (and thereby dodge smalltalk) by simply rewording them into something everybody at the table can understand.

We just weren't thinking on the same planes. My mind made most connections so quickly and automatically that I didn't realize other people's didn't. I didn't know why I couldn't have a conversation with other children. I just knew it didn't work. They would just stare at me and then leave. I knew I could talk to adults fine, but I didn't have enough life experience to realize the other kids couldn't make mental connections like I could.

It was actually when my younger sister started school that it clicked. I knew she was a smart girl, but academic subjects were surprisingly hard for her. That was when I realized someone could be smart, but have to take time to learn certain things, or at least in certain contexts, and that the things they learned might have to be layered on top of each other slowly.

Prior to that, my only experience had been of someone's presenting an idea to me and my immediately understanding it. It's hard to relate to other people, especially children, when you don't have that conceptual framework.

People like genius children/prodigies that don't have a natural peer group require trade offs find them one or else they lose out on important non-intellectual skills.

Now of course interacting with people that are twice my age during my teens has produced some bonus problems in my social skills, but the alternative here is feeling completely isolated, not somehow magically learning to be normal™ person™ as many educators seem to think.

This child does great with his peers. They relate around activities like soccer or other normal kid stuff. It hasn't been a problem yet. He's bored out of his wits in class, but the social stuff is fine.

I also don't think he has the maturity to do well with kids much older than him. College students can interact around intellectual interests just fine, but to be blunt, he'd just come off as super-obnoxious to college-age kids (not in a snooty way, but in the same way as most other kids his age). I don't think he'd make many friends there.

I was admitted under this category, and when my "one or two" courses ended up stretching into half a degree... well, as long as I was getting mostly A+ grades, nobody was going to step in to say that I wasn't allowed to take any more courses.

As a practical matter, I'm sure it helped that my father was a Professor of Chemistry and a widely-respected member of the University Senate. When my admission required approval from the Dean of Science, his response was "no problem, I'll see him at lunch tomorrow". I like to think that I could have gotten in without that connection, but having someone on the inside who knew how the system worked absolutely made things run more smoothly.

*Thinks of course the creator of Tarsnap was a child prodigy.

I am much more a fan of their work on diffing

Large social gaps are hard to bridge too, and I’d imagine that age is one of those things.

As for recommending it to a super-gifted kid - I don't think the program is setup to allow that. You have to have a high-school diploma and at least a bit of work experience to even be admitted. I also think that one drawback of the program is that you can graduate without having written a ton of code, which is fine for someone who's been doing it for a long time, but less ideal for someone who hasn't?

1) A GED would be trivial for this kid. So the high school diploma, I'm not worried about.

2) Kid started doing (real, not Scratch) programming in 1st grade. I'm not worried about coding experience or computer science background. I am worried about software engineering background, but that could come later.

We had obviously gifted kids in my school and they came across as arrogant and entitled. 15 years later, most of them went on to get graduate degrees but don’t seem to be progressing socially (i.e. absent from reunions, weddings, small town bar run-ins)

The test might be trivial, but being able to take it isn't trivial if you don't meet the age requirements.

I just did a web search. I didn't realize they had age requirements. Thank you.

My mother dropped out at 14 and got a GED by 15 back in the 70s because she was so bored. (Parents didn't believe university was for girls, so that wasn't an option).

Seems like a way to screw over a particular subset of kids.

As at the end of the day. The reality is it's about who you know. And if your more concerned about the degree. Your missing the point.

My parents took the middle approach: skipping grades and doing gifted and talented programs. It still wasn’t nearly fast enough. Socially it was still tough for me.

My only advice is don’t ignore the social aspect. Still there has to be a better way than sticking them in public school for 12 years. After-school activities like athletics might be helpful.

Good luck!

I think that goes for any leanrer, independent or traditional. Ask a random sample of college graduates to lecture for an hour on their degree focus and you will see the evidence of this.

Accreditation is important, especially if the school is not well known nationally.

I have no personal experience with WGU or Phoenix or other online unis. But I've met a few folks who graduated from lesser schools (outside the top 200) on traditional campuses. Unless those kids were preternaturally bright and took the initiative to teach themselves (fill the gaps), they often face an uphill battle to recover from the poor preparation that an undemanding and incomplete academic program can inflict on 1) their ability to compete in those skills on the open market and 2) their passion for learning. IMHO, that's a high price to pay.

My advice: don't cheap out on your education.

It's really important to note that I'm not particularly gifted. I was required to work "real jobs" over the summer starting at 15 and the only way to convince my parents that programming was a "real job" was to make as much as I could working at the community pool. After the first summer I kept working over the semesters nearly full time. I was doing freelance Perl CGI and PHP+HTML+JS junk. my main advantages were:

1) I could do piece work for $8/hr,

(2) I presented professionally because I was usually the only native English speaker bidding on the project,

(3) I was a single person doing full stack + sales/bidding (the competing offshore outfits mostly sliced up labor between backend, frontend, and sales due to language barriers and extremely low-skilled programming labor. For projects of the size I was bidding on this introduced a lot of expenses/overhead without any real advantages), and

(4) I was available in US time zones when bidding on these projects. Even during the school year my after-school availability was way better than the offshore shops could usually offer, and I could answer emails during the school day.

To reiterate: not a genius! Just a kid slinging super simple HTML+JS+SQL+PHP/Perl. I didn't even know SQL for real; I knew CREATE, SELECT (without joins), UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE. Joins were implemented using multiple queries and for loops. Didn't matter for my clients, who just wanted cheap CMSes/ordering systems/etc. for random folks' .com get rich quick schemes, pizza shops who thought they really needed a customer website, etc. I'm pretty sure grubhub/slice/google maps/social media destroyed my old market a decade ago ;)

So a real genius getting there by 13 seems like an extreme outlier but not at all impossible.

>That, plus CMU OMSCS, seems like something they could finish by age 17. Socially, I'm not sure they'd do well starting traditional college early. Academically, middle / high school seems like a waste of time.

Apparently even high school is a waste of time. What's not a waste of time for you? Are you to be put directly as head of engineering at Tesla so that someone as gifted as you doesn't "waste" their precious time?

Swap that for a random CA university and we're at $150k (using their numbers!)

If you focus on tuition alone it's cheaper, but room and board do add up, and if you come from out-of-state you're even worse off.

People under-estimate the total cost of school: housing is going to be the biggest expense in CA.

It's insane to think that only a few decades prior, the CSU/UC system was almost entirely covered with pell-grants and student aid if you were from CA, a UC you could cover with just a PT job, or working FT in the Summer.

Now it's entirely impossible to walk out without high 5 to low 6 digits worth of debt even if you live with your parents.

We took the envy of the University system in the US and turned it over to the administrative cronies that came from banks and hedge-funds who monetized it 20 ways from Sunday in order to bleed the students dry and wasted it on bloarted salaries form themselves and more needless things to attract foreign money into the the campuses while gutting the academic programs where ever possible--we used such crappy lab equipment in most of my undergrad it was astonishing where all the money went in student and lab fees.

I went to several CSUs, as well as did summer school or took extra elective at Community colleges to expedite my graduation date and to make up for a lost semester due to a severe car accident, and the level of BS I went through only to see how these leeches operated still makes my blood boil.

I was in an impacted major, Biology, in one of the major 'party schools' in the CSU system and these bastards prioritized admission into the department based on out of state and non-US based tuition rates.

They didn't even hide it, either: they only offered a class you needed to graduate once a year and instead of opening up the section for more students they capped it unless you were from out-of state or out of US and could ten petetion for it based on an 'urgency' basis.

I'm glad they went to Zoom school model, because it shows just how unnecessary 99% of the expenses are and we're re-thinking how we actually educate and accredit degrees.

I got into a well-known University in Europe with a strong AI and ML CompSci program after having founded a fintech startup and my work experience working for a megacorp.

And to be honest, I now realize that my actual worth was way higher even back then (an honors student with letters of recommendation) but I put up with a lot of it because of the 2008 financial crisis that hit me/my family really hard economically as well as the CSUs particularly bad (they cut the budgets hard) and made us all scramble for the doors in order to graduate and try to get into the horrible job market for the few jobs left over.

In short, I will laugh on the grave of traditional academia, which cannot come soon enough.

I understand there's some stigma for community colleges but you can get a great education without getting anywhere near 200K. Won't be Ivy League though.

For example, Stony Brooks costs 10K in tuition per year for in-state residents.

2 years community college: 4 semesters, ~$1,400

2 years university: 9 quarters (took 1 summer), ~$12,500

These are early 2010's numbers in California, not a private university.

I look back and I am pleased with the education I received for the most part, especially in my major (CS)

It's totally doable to end up debt free with a part time job while living at home. Or easily payable after graduation.

Jesus. Is this how much CS degrees cost in America? I thought that price was only for Medicine :headexplode: