Alexander Oshmyansky is no ordinary teenager. The University Of Colorado student is getting his degree after just one year. That's right, just two semesters at college. The 18-year-old graduated from Dakota Ridge High School in Littleton last year. While attending high school, Oshmyansky had taken advanced classes and amassed about 100 college credits, which is equivalent to more than six semesters of a class load of 16 credit hours. Although he could have cruised through high school in less than four years, he chose not to. "I sort of hung around high school for the social aspect," he said. "I didn't want to be one of those 12-year-old kids wandering the halls at a university."
Now, with his biochemistry degree in hand, he's headed to medical school. Some of his professors say he's smarter than a lot of the university faculty. He "tested out" of most of the college's required classes and he didn't have to pay a lot of attention in the classes he did attend. "There was always a lot of free time on campus. In fact, last fall I did a musical with my spare time," said Oshmyansky. He also had enough free time for a genetic research job at a campus lab.
His professors say he's one of a kind. "I was writing letters of recommendation for him for medical school before he'd even gotten any grades," said Steve Langer, his chemistry professor. "He has a handle on chemistry that most of us don't have. We don't think that way." His chemistry professors would even ask for Oshmyansky's opinion on their own research projects.
Oshmyansky said he tried to hide his age from his classmates. "The subject didn't come up that I was 18 until 5 or 6 weeks in when the guys in the lab said, do you want to go bar hopping with us? And I said 'that might be a little rough,'" he said. Now, after being the youngest student in his college classes, he's ready to be the youngest kid in medical school. Oshmyansky said he plans to attend medical school either at CU Health Sciences Center, Duke University or Washington University in St. Louis. "I'm pretty passionate about becoming a doctor and feel I can learn the most about medicine and become the best doctor I can be by learning the subject at this age," he said. He said ultimately, he wants to focus his research on developing a new cancer treatment. "I wanted to get into a field where you can really do groundbreaking research," he said. "With the human genome coming out, that opens a whole new area for discoveries." |