Outside of school, Laurent Simons is your typical 9-year-old child.
The Belgian boy plays video games like Fortnite and Minecraft, spends
time on social media, and loves to travel. But when it comes to
studying, he puts students a decade his seniors to shame, graduating
from university at age nine.
If all goes well and Laurent Simons completes his final project at
Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands, he will graduate
with a degree in electrical engineering in December. Most people take
three years to graduate from the very same program, but Laurent entered
just last year, and he is set to complete in just 10 months. That’s
thanks to his superior intellect and his remarkable capacity to take in
lots of information in very little time, which allows professors to go
through the curriculum at a much faster pace.
“It’s been quite special and enjoyable,” Peter Baltus, a professor of
integrated electronics, said about working with his youngest ever
student. “Laurent’s absorption capacity is very high, which means that
everything goes much faster, and we can cover a lot more material in a
short span of time.”
Laurent’s parents recall his grandparents telling them that he was
special from a very young age, but they didn’t pay much attention to
their observations at first. But then he started primary school when he
was four, and at six-year-old he was already in high-school. Then he
started university and professors there couldn’t stop talking about how
impressive their son was. So yes, now they realize that their son is
pretty special.
The 9-year-old “child genius” says he wants to study medicine after
he graduates in December, and start working on artificial organs. That’s
definitely a field that many experts claim has the potential to change
medicine as we know it today, but Laurent Simons’ reasons are personal.
The grandparents he grew up with suffer from heart conditions, and he
wants to help people like them.
Although his parents claim that outside of his studies, Laurent is a
regular child, with regular hobbies (video games, watching Netflix and
travelling), they have been accused of turning him into a mini-celebrity
by making him available for interviews and news specials. They also
manage his social media profiles, which some have argued is very
adult-oriented. There are those who claim that by rushing the boy’s
education, his parents have robbed him of his childhood. However, the
boy’s father has hit back at critics, saying that everything his son has
achieved hasn’t been imposed on him, but rather it’s “who he is”.
