Eleven-year-old Agastya Jaiswal of St Mary’s College, Yousufguda, on Sunday became the youngest student to clear the Intermediate second-year exam in the state. He got 63 per cent marks in CEC.
Agastya is the younger brother of national table tennis player Naina Jaiswal, who cleared the exam at the age of 10 in undivided Andhra Pradesh.Agastya will be joining the BA Journalism course at the same college. His father Ashwani Kumar said Agastya dreamed of becoming a doctor once he meets the eligibility requirements.
“We will be enrolling him for the UG course. If he is serious about MBBS, then he needs to do Intermediate again with BPC and appear for the medical entrance test for which the minimum age is 17 years. It is too early to think of it now as he is just 11,” he said.
Further, Agastya said that he will complete his graduation in commerce first, and then will repeat Class 12 to ultimately become a doctor.
While Agastya has been displayed his brilliance, there have been a couple of others who have also stunned us with their achievements at a very early age. Indian ophthalmologist and academic Balamurali Ambati was doing calculus when he was four years old and co-authored a research book on AIDS when he was 11. At 13, he completed his studies at New York University. And in 1995, when he was 17, he graduated from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York City, effectively becoming the world’s youngest doctor (and a Guinness World Record holder). Ambati completed all his medical training by the age of 24, making him an anomaly in the medical profession – as most doctors don’t finish their instruction until their early to mid 30s.
Another stellar example is Akshay Venkatesh won a bronze medal at the International Physics Olympiad in Virginia when he was 11 years old. Venkatesh chose to switch his focus to mathematics soon after taking home the bronze, and he went on to win two more Olympiad medals in the subject. He finished high school when he was only 13 and went to the University of Western Australia, graduating with first class honors in Mathematics in 1997 – the youngest student ever to do so.
Even then, Venkatesh didn’t pause for a breath, and a PhD from Princeton University consummated his academic success. At only 20 years old and with a doctorate under his belt, the young scholar already had a solid position in the world of academia. Since completing his PhD in 2002, he has gone from holding a post-doctorate position at MIT to becoming a Clay Research Fellow and, most recently, a professor at Stanford University.
Another fascinating tale is of Alia Sabur who alerted her parents to her talents at an early age, reading when she was only eight months old. Alia started out elementary school like any normal student, but teachers soon realized she would be better off in college and she went straight from 4th grade into a degree program at Stony Brook University when she was just 10 years old. She holds the Guinness record for being the youngest full university professor, appointed to the faculty at Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea when she was 18 years old.
