13-year-old Long Island boy with a 168 IQ gets into NYU master’s program: what educators can learn from his story
The first thing I noticed was the way he held his pencil—like a tiny conductor’s baton, tapping it against the kitchen table while staring at a math workbook meant for someone twice his age. His mom, Sarah, had called me because she wasn’t sure what to do next. Her son, Leo, was eleven at the time, and the school had just told her that they had “run out of curriculum for him.” That phrase stuck with me. Run out. As if learning were a roll of paper towels.
Two years later, Leo made the news cycle for a brief moment: a thirteen-year-old from Long Island, IQ measured at 168, accepted into a master’s program at NYU. The headlines wrote themselves. But what those headlines missed was the messy, uncertain path that got him there—and the everyday decisions his parents made that had nothing to do with IQ scores.
I spent a few afternoons with Leo and his family during that transition period, and I’ve been thinking about what their experience can tell us about raising kids who are different in ways we don’t have a clear script for.
Leo didn’t look like a genius. He looked like a kid who kept losing his sweatshirt and who made a very serious PowerPoint presentation on the history of playground equipment for no clear reason. He was also deeply anxious about small changes in routine. When his father moved his desk six inches closer to the window, Leo didn’t speak to him for two days. This is the part nobody puts in the press release.
His mother’s biggest challenge wasn’t finding advanced material. It was finding a way to let Leo be a child while also honoring his need to learn at a pace that felt natural to him. She told me about a Tuesday evening in March. Leo was sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading a computational linguistics paper on his tablet, and his younger sister was building a fort out of sofa cushions. Sarah felt this strange pressure in her chest. Should she make him put the tablet down and play outside? Should she call the school and tell them he was too advanced for the enrichment program?
Instead, she did something very specific. She sat down beside him and asked a simple question: “What’s the part that’s making you excited?”
He looked up, a little surprised. Then he spent the next twenty minutes explaining how grammar structures could be mapped to algorithms, using the fort his sister had built as an analogy. Sarah didn’t understand half of it, but she noticed something important while he talked: his shoulders weren’t tense anymore. The anxiety had been about having to hold all that curiosity inside.
That moment is a small example of a bigger principle. Gifted kids don’t just need harder work. They need permission to share the weird passions that are driving them. Without that, the intelligence can turn inward and become a source of stress. Leo’s parents made a deliberate habit of asking him what was interesting, not what he had learned. That shift in phrasing matters. “What did you learn today?” is a report. “What was interesting today?” is an invitation.
There were also practical environmental adjustments. Sarah told me that they stopped trying to enforce a “normal” homework time. Instead, they set up a visual schedule with blocks of time labeled “deep work,” “reading for fun,” and “automatic pilot” for things like laundry or taking a walk. Leo could decide which block to start with. The only rule was that he had to spend at least twenty minutes in each block. This gave him control over his sequencing without making schoolwork optional. It sounds simple, but for a kid who could easily hyperfocus on one subject for six hours, having clear stopping points was crucial. A timer, a physical object on the desk, and a checklist all helped him transition. The checklist wasn’t about discipline. It was about making the invisible process of switching tasks feel tangible.
Of course, the school situation was a different kind of struggle. The middle school followed a standard acceleration model: they would pull him out of math class twice a week and give him a packet. By the time he was in seventh grade, he’d finished the packet by Tuesday morning and had nothing to do until Thursday. His teacher, a well-meaning woman named Mrs. Delgado, told me that she felt guilty every time she saw him staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t a specialist in gifted education. She was a middle school math teacher with thirty other students.
This is where the NYU acceptance story actually begins. It wasn’t some dramatic leap from seventh grade to graduate school. It was a slow, bureaucratic negotiation. Leo’s parents asked the school to allow him to take a community college course in logic during the spring semester. The school agreed, reluctantly. Then they asked if he could sit in on a high school computer science class at the local public high school, because his middle school didn’t offer one. The principal said yes, but only if Leo finished his regular assignments. That meant Leo was doing two sets of low-level work just to access slightly less low-level material.
At home, the frustration was real. Leo would come back from the high school class and slam his backpack on the floor. “They keep explaining things I already read about,” he said. “It’s like watching a movie at 0.5x speed.” His parents didn’t tell him to be grateful. They didn’t say, “Just try your best.” Instead, his father sat with him and asked, “What would you actually want the class to look like?”
Leo said he wanted to skip the first two weeks and just do the final project. His father then helped him write a short proposal to the teacher, offering to demonstrate his understanding of the prerequisite material with a 15-minute presentation. The teacher said yes. That small win gave Leo a sense of agency that worksheets never could. The point wasn’t the grade. The point was that he saw a way to shape his own day, one small request at a time.
By the time he was thirteen, he had earned enough credit through a combination of online courses and dual-enrollment programs that NYU’s master’s program in computer science took a chance on him. The acceptance letter was exciting, but the real story is how his parents handled the week after the news broke. They didn’t throw a big party. They didn’t put his IQ on a bumper sticker. They went out for ice cream, and Leo asked if he could still join the school’s robotics club even though he wasn’t in that grade anymore. His mom said yes, and that felt more meaningful to him than the NYU email.
What I’ve learned from watching this family is that intelligence at that level isn’t a gift you unwrap. It’s a personality trait that needs managing, like a strong will or a deep shyness. There were days when Sarah wanted to hide his tablet. There were days when Leo sobbed over a single problem in a graduate-level textbook because he couldn’t crack it, and his parents had to sit with that frustration without fixing it. They learned to say, “That looks really hard. Do you want to talk it through, or do you want to close the book for an hour?” Simple phrasing, but it gave him a choice instead of a demand.
For parents and teachers who aren’t dealing with a 168 IQ, there’s still something here. Every kid has a version of Leo’s restless mind. It might be a passion for drawing, a fixation on dinosaurs, or a stubborn need to know why the sky is blue. The same low-friction strategies apply: ask about what’s interesting, not what was learned. Allow for blocks of deep focus. Let them negotiate changes to their assignments, even if the school won’t. And never solve the frustrating problem for them unless they ask you to.
Leo starts at NYU this fall. He’ll be in a classroom with students who are, in most cases, ten years older and have certificates of completion rather than permission slips from a middle school principal. His mom told me she’s not worried about the academic part. She’s worried about whether he’ll remember to eat lunch. That feels like a normal thing to worry about, which is perhaps the most reassuring detail in the entire story.
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