Aspiring 12-year-old physicist pursues degree at FIU

This semester, Sky Choi is taking Calculus II, Intermediate Chinese Conversation, Physics with Calculus I, Physics Problem Solving, Physics seminar and Physics laboratory.

There’s little doubt what the 12-year-old FIU student, a black belt in Taekwondo who speaks Korean, Chinese and Latin, wants to be when he grows up.

“I want to be a physicist, do research and probably teach, too,” said Sky, who will graduate high school in May. “You need physics to understand the world and the universe. It also helps explain life.”

Choi, of Pembroke Pines, is what experts call profoundly gifted, a child who scores higher than 99.9 percent of the population on IQ and achievement tests.

By age 3, Sky – the English translation of his Korean middle name Hanul -could speak and read English, as well as Korean, his father’s native tongue. By 4 years old, his mother, Dana Choi, remembers a child with an insatiable need for knowledge, especially when it came to mathematics. By the time he finished preschool, Sky was already working on third grade math.

He skipped several grade levels, craving for more challenges and, by 9 years old, Sky was in high school.

“It came to a point where he really needed a lot more than any school was able to give,” Dana Choi said. “By the time he was 9, he had already decided that he was ready for college. Sky is just one of these kids who seemed from very early on to know what he wanted to do and had a perseverant attitude of how to get it.”

And perseverance paid off: Sky, then 10, and his parents turned to Florida International University, opting for home schooling and dual enrollment in college.

“FIU looked the best in terms of caliber of students and curriculum,” Dana Choi said. “All in all it seemed like the perfect fit for Sky.”

In his two years at FIU, Sky, who has also found the time to earn a third degree black belt in Taekwondo, has taken astronomy, several math and physics classes-and all the Chinese courses FIU has to offer. Once he graduates high school, he’ll begin his official college life at FIU in the fall-with enough credits earned to start as a sophomore.

But it’s not just academics that have set Sky apart from most kids his age. He is also the founder of a non-profit organization called The List Kids (www.thelistkids.org), which sends care packages to Iraqi children who have immigrated to the United States.

“If they are lucky enough to make it to America, I want to be able to let them know they are welcome and safe here,” he said. “They will be coming to a land and culture so very different from their own.”

So far, Sky has enlisted the help of 125 volunteers from across the country and sent more than 600 packages that include toys, gift cards and movies to Iraqi children.

As much as Sky has taken advantage of FIU’s academic wealth, FIU, in turn, has embraced Sky.

“I’ve assigned our senior vice president for research development and graduate education, who is a nuclear physicist, to be Sky’s advisor,” said FIU President Modesto A. Maidique. “Vice President George Walker will guide this exceptional young man through his career here at FIU, helping Sky focus his incredible talent.”

Walker is a theoretical nuclear physicist who obtained his undergraduate education at Wesleyan University, his graduate education at Case Western University, and his post-doctoral education at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and at Stanford University.

“Sky is a very bright and engaging aspiring scientist,” Walker said. ” Several of my colleagues and I are interacting with him to make sure that he gets timely answers to his questions and general advice with regards to his plans to continue his education toward a graduate degree in physics, and eventually a very productive career as a scientist.  It is a terrific privilege being able to work with him.”

– By Jean-Paul Renaud