12-Year-Old Whiz Kid To Attend ASU, Wants To Be NASA Engineer

TEMPE, AZ — A 12-year-old wunderkind is set to start classes at Arizona State University this summer, and she has her sights set on infinity and beyond when she graduates.

Alena Wicker finished high school thanks to home schooling and plans to major in astronomical and planetary science and chemistry at the university. Her end goal is a job as a NASA engineer working on planetary rovers, Wicker told KPNX.

She said she gained her passion for science and engineering at a young age while playing with Lego sets. “I always dreamed of being an engineer because throughout my life I liked the building,” she said.

Wicker has known she wanted to work at NASA since she was 4, Wicker’s mother, Daphne McQuarter, told KPNX, adding that her daughter always had a “gift for numbers and ... science.”

If everything goes according to plan, Wicker will be 16 by the time she graduates, with a driver’s license and a job offer from NASA, she said. “I’ll be driving one of those future space mobiles by the time I graduate college,” she told KPNX.

Wicker isn’t the first preteen to enroll at a university. In 2012, Javier Urcuyo was 12 when he began taking calculus courses at ASU while also taking high school classes, according to ASU's student-run newspaper, The State Press.

Kiavash Garakani was also 12 when he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley as a molecular biology major in 2012, according to the campus newspaper The Daily Californian. Garakani followed in his older sister’s footsteps; she graduated from the college with a bachelor’s degree at the age of 14.

Laurent Simons was on track to become the world's youngest college graduate at the age of 9 but left the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands in December 2019 after his parents found out he wouldn’t be able to graduate from the school before turning 10, according to CNN.

Michael Kearney is the current record holder as the youngest person ever to graduate from college, having obtained a degree when he was 10 in 1994, The Washington Post reported.