10-year-old college sophomore credits ‘willpower’
After two straight-A years of community college, he’s set sights on the starsBy Mike Celizic
TODAYShow.com contributor
updated 12:17 p.m. ET, Wed., June. 4, 2008
Moshe Kai Cavalin likes to tell about the time his father took him to take his college entrance test. The administrators told his dad he couldn’t bring an 8-year-old with him into the test room. His father told them the boy was going in alone — because he was the one taking the test.
“They were smiling ... thought he was telling a joke,” Moshe told TODAY’s Ann Curry Wednesday in New York. But when Moshe’s scores came back, the administrators were suddenly telling his dad something else — that Moshe needed to be taking advanced mathematics.
And so, on a day when other kids his age are in the final week or two of fifth grade, 10-year-old Moshe was visiting New York and off for the summer, having just completed his second year at East Los Angeles College, a community college.
Moshe aced all his courses, in such subjects as statistics, advanced mathematics, foreign languages and music. Now he says he’s hoping for a scholarship to a prestigious four-year college.
To say Moshe is a prodigy is like saying Michelangelo could paint a little.
His parents, Shu Chen Chien and Yosef Cavalin, have known that ever since they tried to enroll him in a private elementary school and discovered that the boy knew more than his teachers. So they home-schooled him for two years before realizing he was already beyond elementary and high school level and ready for college.
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