14-Year-Old to Become Youngest-Ever TCU Grad

Carson Huey-You entered Texas Christian University in 2013 as an 11-year-old. On Saturday, he will become a 14-year-old college graduate with a degree in physics — TCU’s youngest-ever graduate.

Carson will join 1,575 people who will receive their bachelor’s degree from the university in this commencement ceremony.

“My favorite part was going to all my classes and learning new things … really expanding my knowledge,” he told tcu360.com.

“My favorite part was going to all my classes and learning new things … really expanding my knowledge.”
Carson Huey-You

Carson’s most-recent research with his mentor, Dr. Magnus Rittby, involved working to learn more about how to calculate energy eigenvalues of quantum mechanical states, tcu360 reported. Eigenvalues are a set of scalars — a physical quantity describable by a single element of a number field such as a real number — associated with a linear system of equations.

“So one of the things we’re looking at is states that exist for a short period of time,” Rittby told the TCU student media website. “Those kinds of phenomenon where things come together and live for a while then disintegrate turns out to be very important in chemical reactions and nuclear reactions, for example.”

Two years ago, Carson presented biophysics research related to cancerous tumor growth with Dr. Hana Dobrovolny. They compiled articles about cancer research to try to predict future tumor growth, and its behavior based on a few weeks or months of data, tcu360 reported.

Carson’s minor is in Chinese, and he participated in the “Chinese Bridge” Proficiency Competition held by the Confucius Institute, where he won third place against competitors from across the southern United States.

He will be one of the first students graduating with a Chinese minor from TCU.

Carson’s mother, Claretta Kimp, told tcu360 that TCU did a great job in helping her son maintain his childhood despite undertaking a rigorous education.

“TCU is safe, and they can still be children.”
Claretta Kimp, Carson’s mother

“TCU is safe, and they can still be children,” she told tcu360. “Even after four years of being here they are still kids, their childhood has not been sucked out of them.”

Carson will begin his master’s degree studies in the fall, and he will be joined on campus by his younger brother, Cannan, 10, who has been accepted into TCU’s undergraduate class of 2021.

Kimp told KXAS/Channel 5 that Carson began to show an interest in math at the age of 3.

“He asked me if he could learn calculus and I thought, ‘hmm, OK,'” she told the station.

“It didn’t come easily. It really didn’t,” Carson Channel 5. “I knew I wanted to do physics when I was in high school, but then quantum physics was the one that stood out to me, because it was abstract. You can’t actually see what’s going on, so you have to sort of rely on the mathematics to work everything out.”

Carson plans on pursuing a career in quantum physics, the branch of science that deals with quantum theory — the basis of modern physics which explains the nature and behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic level.