2 degrees, NASA job, and a writer at 17
Print Edition
Moshe Kai Cavalin has two university degrees, but he’s too young to vote. The American flies airplanes, but he’s too young to drive a car alone.
Life is filled with contrasts for Cavalin, a 17-year-old from San Gabriel, California, who has dashed by major milestones as his age seems to lag behind. He graduated from community college at age 11. Four years later, he had a bachelor’s in math from the University of California.
This year, he started online classes to get a master’s in cybersecurity through the Boston area’s Brandeis University. He decided to postpone that pursuit for a couple of terms, though, while he helps NASA develop surveillance technology for airplanes and drones.
Between all that, he’s racked up an exhausting list of extracurricular feats. He just published his second book, drawing on his experience being bullied and stories he’s heard from others. He plans to have his airplane pilot’s license by the year’s end. At his family’s home near Los Angeles, he has a trove of trophies from martial arts tournaments.
Still, Cavalin insists that he’s more ordinary than people think. He credits his parents for years of focused instruction balanced by the freedom to pick his after-school activities. His eclectic interests stem from his cultural heritage, he said, with a mother from Chinese Taipei and a father from Brazil.
“My case isn’t that special. It’s just a combination of parenting and motivation and inspiration,” Cavalin says after a recent shift at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.
His parents say he was always a quick study. At 4 months, he pointed to a jet in the sky and said the Chinese word for airplane, his first word. Cavalin hit the limits of his home schooling after studying trigonometry at age 7.
In conversation, Cavalin is unflappable, at least until he discusses his distaste for being called a certain word: “One word I don’t take too kindly is genius,” he said. “Genius is just kind of taking it too far.”
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