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al76slc · #1 08-10-2009, 04:01 PM

At 19, With College Behind Her, Law School Beckons
By Jacques Steinberg

While senior year of high school or freshman year of college can sneak up on students and parents alike, such milestones don’t tend to arrive as quickly as they did on the academic journey of Kate McLaughlin. Her path might best be likened to that of a speeding truck on an interstate highway.

At 19, an age when many of her peers are starting their college careers, Ms. McLaughlin is about to enroll in law school, according to an article in the Orange County Register. Here is how the article, which appeared last Friday, opens:

She skipped six grades, enrolled in community college at age 12 and graduated from UC San Diego at 17.

Only one class in her entire academic career has been challenging, she says – Calculus II, at age 13 – and now she’s headed to Northwestern University this fall for law school.

Life seems good for Kate McLaughlin, who turned 19 last week.

“Schoolwork has always been easy for me,” said McLaughlin, an only child who lives with her mother and stepfather in Irvine. “It was skipping from easy work to more easy work. I’ve never had a feeling of, this is where I belong.”

For those teenagers in a rush to complete their academic careers, the odyssey of Ms. McLaughlin, of Irvine, Calif., might seem like a dream ride. But according to the article:

To say McLaughlin’s life has been easy – or that her parents haven’t struggled to raise a child who was constantly bored with school and couldn’t relate to her peers – would be to dismiss the painstaking, lonely path that McLaughlin has chartered.

She has been burdened all her life with finding a place that would fulfill her insatiable quest for knowledge, a learning environment where she wouldn’t feel like an intellectual oddity.

“I’m incredibly self-conscious about my age,” she said. “It’s funny. When I tell people how old I am, they always make the same comment: ‘Like Doogie Howser?’ ‘Yes, like Doogie Howser.’”

And, because McLaughlin is so smart, her parents have struggled to find a sympathetic ear, someone who understood the challenges they faced nurturing a child who wanted to grow up so fast.

The article raises lots of issues that would be familiar to gifted and talented children, and their families. Can readers of The Choice relate? Let us know what you think by using the comment box below.

A related article was posted today on abalawjournal.com. My thanks to my colleague John Schwartz, who covers legal issues for The Times, for bringing these articles to my attention.

http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/teenlaw/?hp