A Long Island whiz kid is about to become the youngest girl ever to graduate from college in the nation.
School officials at SUNY Stony Brook say Alia Sabur, a 14-year-old math and music prodigy, will not only graduate summa cum laude, the applied-math student has been awarded a prestigious GAANN fellowship that will put her on track to get her Ph.D. by 18.
The East Northport teen’s “Hello Kitty” book bag is filled with math and physics books. She also plays clarinet and has a black belt in karate.
She said she hopes her area of research – the biophysics of protein folding – might someday lead to a cure for Alzheimer’s or mad-cow disease.
“It’s really, really great when you discover something and you can say, ‘I found something that nobody else knows.’ Eureka and all that,” she giggled.
Alia has not yet been on her first date, but if she were old enough, she wouldn’t date most of her classmates because they’re “geeky math people.”
She said she socializes with college friends during the day and hangs out with pals her age at home.
“Trust me, if you saw me with my same-age friends, you would not know I was a college student because I don’t act like one,” Alia said.
One of Alia’s teachers, associate professor Charles Fortmann, said he first met Alia two years ago when she took his multivariable calculus course – and he realized she had quite a future when she corrected a mistake he had made on a printed test sheet.
“She would ask questions once in a while, and I would have to think about it, and she was right. She was a good student and, of course, got an ‘A’ in the course,” Fortmann said.
The challenge of Alia’s parents, Julie and Mark Sabur, “was maintaining a balance so she would have a childhood and an education,” said Julie Sabur, a former TV reporter.
“I couldn’t sleep the night before she started her first year,” Julie Sabur said. “I wondered, ‘What am I doing, bringing my 10-year- old daughter to college?’ But now, I really think we did the right thing. She’s a tolerant, accepting, decent young lady, and she’s happy and well-adjusted.”