Norton teen set could get Harvard degree before graduating from High School
13-year-old Chris Strynar from Norton could get his college degree from Harvard before he even graduates from High School.
"Even from a pretty young age I’ve been counting this and adding things,” said Strynar.
Strynar began taking college classes at BCC about 2 years ago. Now, he attends Wheaton College twice a week and takes online classes from the Harvard Extension School at the same time. He’s doing this course work all while still attending the 8th grade.
"I should get my liberal arts degree junior year. That’ll be before my high school diploma so that should be interesting,” said Strynar.
During an interview Tuesday night, Strynar impressed ABC 6 News completing a Rublik’s cube in a matter of seconds. He says he has always loved math and science. In fact the teen has already built his own computer.
His parents say they always knew he was advanced. His dad also named Chris, telling one particular story about a car ride he had with his son while he was in kindergarten. He says they were playing the "math game" asking simple addition problems when his son asked to learn multiplication.
"We’re like Chris you can’t really teach multiplication you have to memorize your tables and everything else. He begged and pleaded and finally we gave in. We just verbally explained what multiplication was and before the end of the 15 minute trip he knew his multiplication,” said Chris Strynar Senior.
It wasn’t until 5th grade when a teacher really pushed that Strynar needed to be challenged more that his parents decided to give college classes a try.
As for what it’s like to attend classes with students almost twice his age.Chris doesn’t seem phased.
"A lot of them don’t really care or they don’t realize because I’m kind of tall. I haven’t really had a problem socially,” said Strynar.
Strynar says he wants to go to grad school at MIT.
He says he doesn’t know yet what he wants to be when he is older, but says it will definitely be something related to math and computer science.
(C) WLNE 2016
