Peach Tree Times

Thirteen-year-old Caleb Anderson is now a couple of weeks into his first semester at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and, like any other student, he's a bit nervous.

"What was my first day like?" Anderson said in a Georgia Tech video posted to YouTube on Aug. 24. "Well, it was pretty interesting, honestly."

Anderson said he "hadn't really appreciated" how very large the Georgia Tech campus is until he walked across it on his first day and then he checked out his classes the following day.

Caleb Anderson | diversity.gatech.edu

"It's massive, it's huge and it's something that I'm not really used to," he said. "And the classes themselves, all the classes are pretty big, too, there's a lot of students."

Once he was fully immersed into his new life at Georgia Tech, "that nervous feeling did go away a little bit," he said. "This is my life now, this is something I've got to get used to, because my plan is to be at this school for the next five years. And I feel like I'm already acclimating, which is pretty good."

The teenager from Marietta is already at sophomore at Georgia Tech after he spent two years completing prerequisites as part of a dual-enrollment program at Chattahoochee Technical College, according to a Fox 5 Atlanta story.  He plans to major in aerospace engineering.

"There are really two things that I want to go into," Anderson told the Fox affiliate. "First, rocketry, you know space exploration, things like that. I think that's a very interesting prospect and I'd really, really like to go into that and you know, I also want to do commercial aircraft."

Anderson has been ahead of his peers for a long time, certainly since he qualified for MENSA at age 3. He told the Fox affiliate that he hopes to earn his bachelor's degree and, maybe, work on his Ph.D. at MIT.  

As he was growing up, Anderson had to overcome his mother's efforts to allow other students his age to keep up with him.

"Since Caleb was 1, we've been looking at him, like, how is this going to be a reality?" Claire Anderson said in the Georgia Tech video. "I talked about how I made him repeat first grade twice, seventh grade twice, because I was trying to slow him down. But he was determined. This is something that he wanted to do, and he had this dream. And I'm really proud of him but I'm really grateful to Georgia Tech for opening the door for opportunity for a student like Caleb."

The nerves and other obstacles are to be expected, but Caleb is up to it, his father, Kobi Anderson, said in the Georgia Tech video.

"He knows how to get back up from a punch, right," Kobi Anderson said. "If he kind of trips, falls, he gets right back up and just continues to strive."

Caleb Anderson's future success will have its foundation in how much Georgia Tech has done to help him acclimate, including finding two other students to act as mentors, Claire Anderson said.

Caleb Anderson said he has come to Georgia Tech sooner than most but he's ready for the challenges again.

"I thought I was going to be here when I was 18, 19, but now I’m here a lot earlier than I thought I would be," he said. "I realized this is something I'm going to have to push through to get my dream because I have no doubt that a lot of these classes, the classes the next semester and the semester after that are going to be incredibly hard. So, I'm a little bit nervous but I'm still pretty excited to start my classes and things like that."