Chari’s incredible achievement is a feat hard to surpass.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Many bright high school seniors are content graduating with a few Advanced Placement (AP) classes under their belts and entering college with a bit of ready-made credit to put toward their diplomas.
Indian American teenager Joshua Chari on the other hand, figured why rest on the curve when he could blow it out of the water. The 16-year-old from Richardson, Texas is slated to receive gubernatorial honors on Thursday after completing a good chunk of his undergraduate studies while still attending high school and garnering eight associate degrees along the way.
According to CNN, Joshua’s incredible achievement was made possible by the Richardson Independent School District’s dual credit program, in which hundreds of qualifying students can earn college and high school credit simultaneously.
Joshua’s stellar academic record has earned a full scholarship to The University of Texas at Dallas, and the heights that Joshua’s ascended at such a young age have astounded his parents.
“We just wanted him to do his best, do whatever he could. I think he outdid our expectations,” Manjusha Chari, his mother, a nurse practitioner, told CNN.
Indeed, a certain spark seems to run throughout the family; Joshua’s brother, Jonathan, also graduated high school with enough dual credit to earn multiple associate degrees, and held two patents at the tender age of 19.
Joshua’s father, a pilot-turned-information-technology-professional, attributes his sons’ scholastic aptitude to their early exposure to the sciences. From an early age, the wunderkinds were handed their own subscriptions to various youth-geared science magazines such as National Geographic Kids and Kids Discovery, along with publications like Scientific American, Raj Chari said.
Joshua is currently wrapping up an internship at Marlow Industries, where he is focusing on thermoelectric heating, cooling, power generation, and energy harvesting technology. Joshua hopes to one day apply his vast trove of knowledge to the field of engineering.
“I really knew that … the engineering field was what I wanted to be going into because the projects and stuff that I did from a young age, I knew that I wanted to be an engineer,” he told CNN.
Another Indian American prodigy, 11-year-old Tanishq Abraham of Sacramento, Calif., also recently garnered multiple associate degrees in one fell swoop.
The youngster graduated from American River College in Sacramento on May 20 with three associate degrees in math and physical science, general science, and foreign language studies.
According to the local NBC affiliate, he was “the youngest this year to graduate from a Sacramento college with three degrees,” and possibly the youngest in River College’s 60-year-history.
Earlier this year, Tanishq was a contestant on the Lifetime television show Child Genius, in which he placed seventh. The competition was eventually won by fellow Indian American Vanya Shivashankar.