Parents Feared 'We Were Failing' Son. Now He's a 14-Year-Old College Grad with a Job at SpaceX

Kairan Quazi has become Santa Clara University's youngest-ever graduate

When college graduates around the country march across the stage this month to receive their diplomas, their number will include Kairan Quazi, who is just 14 years old.

He will collect an engineering degree from California's Santa Clara University, as the youngest graduate in the school’s 172-year history, and then will start work at SpaceX, as a software engineer on the Starlink program.

"My personal journey has really been about disrupting the status quo," Kairan tells PEOPLE, adding that the past few years in college "have been the happiest three years of my life."

Part of what inspires him is his desire "to be part of something bigger" and how technology can help humanity.

"Think of the benefits in let's say, precision farming, where satellite images can be used to help farmers with managing crop yields and monitoring water levels," Kairan says. "So the utilitarian idea of working on technology that has the greatest good for the greatest number really aligns with my personal values."

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Kairan's journey has not always been easy for the entire Quazi family.

"For the longest time, we actually didn't know until he got tested at 9 years old that he was considered profoundly gifted," says his mom, Julia Quazi. "He's an extreme extrovert. His verbal fluency was so strong. So a lot of the things that seemed strange to us for years, we just chalked it up to very strong vocabulary and a strong personality."

But Kairan did some unusual things, even for a child with strong social and verbal skills. He would get up in the middle of the night in the family's home in the San Francisco Bay Area, and wake up mom Julia and dad Mustahid, a chemical engineer who now does technical sales, to discuss world events. As a toddler, Kairan wanted to address the Arab Spring. As a 4 year old, he wanted to debate why Turkey isn't an official member of the European Union.

The experience grew "disorienting and isolating," Julia says. "We actually felt every day that we were failing as parents because we did not know how to help him. We just didn't have the toolkit to help him feel validated and balanced because we had no idea what we were dealing with."

It turned out that Kairan qualified as “profoundly gifted,” with — not surprisingly — a very high IQ.

After much agonizing, the Quazis enrolled their only child in a local community college, and soon transferred him to Santa Clara University. The move made sense, with things falling into place there for Kairan, Julia says.

Their approach was not universally well received.

"To be honest, there was a lot of backlash for him starting college at age 9," Julia says. "So we had to really turn off social media and not look at comments and really just stopped going to a lot of social events in the Bay Area because the responses were not great. They just believe we were hothousing him."

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Kairan thrived in the college environment, where his professors speak well of him.

"Working with Kairan has been amazing," says the teen's senior advisor, Dr. Nam Ling, who heads the school's Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "I have learned many things while serving as his advisor."

Most people presume that talented or genius kids are not sociable, the professor says.

"On the contrary, Kairan is very sociable and very easy to get along with," Ling says. "In my class and outside classes, he has asked more questions than any other student, keeping the class and discussions lively and stimulating." 

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Kairan has made lots of new college friends while retaining his age-group pals. He likes to play video games and read science fiction. He also has formed some clear opinions on what it's like to be a very young engineer in Silicon Valley.

"I think there's a very widespread belief that Silicon Valley looks for outliers, and most company websites try to sell you on that," says Kairan, who shares his experiences on his Instagram account. "But I can tell you from my own journey, that that is not the case. Despite having a resume and experience that's very rare for an undergraduate, despite proving myself in vigorous graduate areas, and despite the preparation and maturity that I have demonstrated in every opportunity I've been given, the majority of recruiters exercise a concept of dismiss, where my age exists as a solo metric in a vacuum, and my demonstrated abilities and achievements are dismissed."

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To be specific: He applied for 98 jobs, and received three offers.

As for his college experience, have there been any drawbacks to being a very young student at university? Kairan counts one.

"I guess the only downside I found so far to being underage in college was when I tried to rush an engineering fraternity," Kairan says. "But apparently even the professional frats require you to be 18."

Overall, the experience has been a net positive for Kairan.

"I just feel really lucky because, you know, I guess to that point, I have a pretty cool story," he says.

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