Featured Image Credit: WCCO - CBS Minnesota/YouTube
Topics: US News
Poppy Bilderbeck
A 13-year-old from Minnesota is about to earn his bachelor's degree.
By the age of 13, most of us have only spent a couple of years in secondary school, and GCSE's are still fairly far on the horizon, but for Elliott Tanner, he'll be hitting puberty with a bachelor's degree under his belt.
The 13-year-old is set to graduate from The University of Minnesota on 12 May, 2022.
Elliott is currently studying physics and maths, majoring in the former with a minor in the latter.
He told ABC News: "I have an incredible passion for physics. It’s been one of my favorite things to do."
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The 13-year-old has also maintained a 3.78 average during his undergraduate research.
Elliott first began classes at college when he was nine years old, after several years of homeschooling. It only took him two years to complete an entire high school curriculum.
His mother, Michelle Tanner, explained how by the age of three, her son was already doing maths and could read.
She said: "People who hear Elliott’s story say he doesn’t get to be a kid, or he grew up too fast. He still very much is a kid and the only difference is he goes to school in a different building."
Elliott isn't the only child genius in the US either, with Mike Wimmer from Salisbury, North Carolina having graduated from Rowan-Cabarrus Community College last year at the age of just 12 years old.
Alena Wicker from Arizona also finished the entire high school syllabus through homeschooling and went off to college at the age of 12.
Another young prodigy named Caleb Anderson became the youngest person ever to study aerospace engineering at the age of 12 in 2020.
However, the youngest ever college graduate who has held the title for over twenty years is Michael Kearney. Michael graduated from The University of South Alabama in 1994 with a degree in anthropology at the age of 10.
Elliott has since been accepted onto the university's Physics PhD programme.
However, he and his family are having to 'explore all [their] options' in order to try and pay for the course, so far being met 'with dead ends'.
"[We're] trying to apply for any scholarships, fellowships, grants, and we have not been successful," his mother explained.
His family have since started a GoFundMe page to fundraise for Elliott's PhD fees.
The 13-year-old hopes to become a high-energy theoretical physicist, and later a professor of physics at the very same university he's graduated from.
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