When many 14-year-old kids in the US were finishing Class 10, Kairan Quazi graduated from Santa Clara University with a bachelor’s degree to become the youngest graduate in Santa Clara's 172-year history. Next month, he will become the youngest software developer at SpaceX when he starts his first full-time job. Quazi has managed to gain academic and professional success at such a young age thanks to his exceptional IQ. As per The Mercury News, Quazi is qualified as “profoundly gifted,” with an IQ above the 99.9th percentile of the population. His parents first noted his accelerated intellectual growth when he started speaking full sentences at the age of two. On the advice of his paediatrician, Quazi quickly jumped classes. By the age of 10, he enrolled in an applied mathematics programme at Las Positas, a community college in Livermore. Within a year, he transferred to Santa Clara University (SCU), where he studied computer science and engineering. At SCU, Kairan participated in the Association for Computer Machinery and was a senior senator in the Associated Student Government. A month before his graduation, he landed a job interview with SpaceX and bagged a software engineering position. In a LinkedIn post, Quazi announced his graduation from SCU and his hiring by SpaceX. He wrote, “I guess this will be my LinkedIn "I'm excited to announce." post! I am graduating from Santa Clara University's School of Engineering where I learned that "engineering with a mission" is not a gimmicky tagline. Where a culture of rigor, collaboration, accountability, and impact deeply resonated with the needs of a radically accelerated learner.” He added, “I will be joining the coolest company on the planet as a Software Engineer on the Starlink engineering team. One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.”
