What Happens When Your 13-Year-Old Has a 168 IQ? One Family’s NYU Master’s Program Story
The email came on a Tuesday afternoon, while I was standing in my kitchen trying to scrape dried oatmeal off a cereal bowl. My phone buzzed on the counter, and I glanced at it expecting a reminder about a dentist appointment or a notice from the middle school. Instead, it was a forwarded message from my cousin, Rachel, with a subject line that made me pause: “Can you believe this?”
I opened it and saw a link to a news article about a 13-year-old boy from Long Island. His name was Barak, and he had just been accepted into a master’s program at NYU. Not a high school enrichment program, not a summer camp for gifted kids. A real graduate program, with real seminars and real papers and a real student ID card that would let him into buildings where people twice his age were studying for their qualifying exams. His IQ was listed as 168.
I stood there in my kitchen, sponge in hand, and read the article twice. The details were remarkable, sure. But what struck me wasn’t the number attached to his intelligence score. It was a small quote from his mother toward the end of the piece. She said something like, “He still forgets to take out the trash like any other teenager.” That tiny detail mattered to me more than the NYU acceptance letter.
Because the truth is, I’ve been on the other side of this. I’m a teacher, and I’ve had a handful of kids in my classroom over the years who were what you might call “profoundly gifted.” A 168 IQ is on the extreme end of the scale—it’s a score you only see in a fraction of a percent of the population. I’ve never taught a child that far out on the curve, but I’ve taught kids who were close, and I’ve learned that the conversation around these children gets skewed quickly. People imagine they live in a world of effortless brilliance, where the hardest part of school is being patient with the other kids in class. The reality is much more complicated, and much more human.
Barak’s story brings that into focus. He’s a 13-year-old who will be taking graduate-level courses while his peers are still navigating the social labyrinth of eighth grade. On the surface, it looks like the ultimate validation of a gifted trajectory—the point where the system finally says, “Yes, you belong here.” But if you read closely, the practical roadmap is blurry. How do you fit a graduate seminar into a life that still includes weekend sleepovers? How do you write a research paper when your hand still cramps up from holding a pencil for too long? How do you explain to a professor that you’d love to stay after class to discuss the reading, but your mom needs to pick you up by 4:30?
The news coverage tends toward two extremes. Either it celebrates the boy as a prodigy whose academic path is a natural progression, or it worries that he’s being robbed of a normal childhood. I think the real story is quieter than both of those narratives. It’s a story about fitting unusual needs into an ordinary life, and about the slow, unglamorous work of accommodating a brain that moves faster than the body and the social calendar that surrounds it.
I remember a student I had several years ago named Marcus. He wasn’t 13 and he wasn’t in a master’s program, but he was the kind of kid who would correct me during a history lesson—not in a disruptive way, but factually, because he had read the textbook cover to cover and then gone to the library to verify it. He was 11, and he spent his recess sitting on a bench, reading a biography of Nikola Tesla. The other kids liked him well enough, but they didn’t quite know what to do with him. He wasn’t strange, exactly. He was just living on a different timetable.
The hardest part wasn’t the schoolwork. It was everything else. It was the moments when he’d finish an assignment in seven minutes and then look around the room with a kind of quiet despair because he had forty minutes left to fill. It was the way he’d raise his hand, bursting with an answer, and then shrink when he realized he’d spoken with too much enthusiasm. It was his mother, who called me one evening, exhausted, asking if I had any advice for how to keep him from finishing a week’s worth of homework in one evening. Not because he was rushing through it, but because he genuinely couldn’t slow his mind down to the pace of the class.
What I learned from Marcus—and what I recognize in Barak’s story—is that practical support looks different from what most people expect. It’s not about handing a kid a college textbook and saying “go for it.” It’s about helping them manage the gap between their intellectual age and their actual age. The cognitive part is often the easiest. The hard part is the emotional coaching, the logistical planning, the quiet moments where you help a child understand that the world isn’t moving too slowly; it’s just moving at a different speed.
When I talk to parents of gifted kids, I always tell them the same thing: make sure there’s room for both worlds. A 13-year-old in a master’s program still needs to be a 13-year-old sometimes. That means they need Saturday mornings with no agenda. It means they need an afternoon to build a fort in the living room or get frustrated with a video game. The trap of high achievement is that it can drain every resource into the academic realm until the whole person feels hollow. And that’s not sustainable.
One concrete thing I’ve seen work well is creating an environment where the child’s intensity is welcomed but not allowed to dominate every single moment. For Barak, that might look like a family agreement that certain hours of the evening are completely off-limits to discussing theoretical physics. It might mean his parents protect a weekly ritual—like baking cookies together or watching a movie—where the conversation isn’t about school. It sounds simple, but it’s often the first thing to go because it feels less urgent than a paper due on Thursday.
There’s also the question of how to handle the social dynamics, and I imagine this is something Barak’s family is already navigating. Gifted kids sometimes struggle to find friends who understand them, and the gap only widens when they’re studying alongside 25-year-olds. But the answer isn’t to force them into social situations where they feel uncomfortable. It’s more about helping them find their people—whether that’s an older student in the program who can relate, a cousin they can relax with, or an online community of other young scholars. The goal isn’t to have a perfectly full social calendar. It’s to have two or three relationships where they can be completely themselves.
And here’s another thing I’ve learned: give the child some say in how much they take on. The adults in these situations—parents, teachers, school administrators—tend to have strong opinions about what a child “should” do with their talents. But the child themselves often has a pretty clear sense of what feels manageable, if anyone stops to ask. A 13-year-old with a 168 IQ is still developing their identity. They might not have the language to say “I need less pressure right now” and “I want to slow down,” but they often know it deep down. The best thing a parent can do is ask open questions and listen without immediately jumping into solutions.
What struck me most about Barak’s story wasn’t the accomplishment itself. It was the image of his daily life that it conjured up: waking up early for classes, taking the train into Manhattan, sitting in a lecture hall surrounded by adults, and then coming home to a family dinner where nobody cares about your IQ score. That last part matters more than almost anything else. The kids who do well—academically and emotionally—are the ones whose families treat their intelligence as one part of who they are, not the defining feature.
I don’t know what Barak will do next. Whether he finishes the master’s program, whether he takes a break, whether he decides to pivot entirely and study something completely different. What I do know is that the most important adults in his life right now are the ones who see the whole child, not just the test scores. They’re the ones who will notice if he’s tired, or anxious, or just a little bit lonely. They’re the ones who will remind him that he’s allowed to be both brilliant and ordinary, sometimes in the very same day.
I think about that image again—Barak forgetting to take out the trash. It’s reassuring, in a way. Intelligence doesn’t erase the messiness of growing up. It doesn’t make you immune to the awkwardness of being 13. It just adds another layer to an already complicated time. And for the parents and teachers around him, the job isn’t to keep pushing forward. It’s to stand nearby, steady and patient, ready to help when he asks and willing to step back when he doesn’t. There’s no perfect way to guide a child like this. There’s only the daily, grounded work of paying attention, one ordinary Tuesday at a time.
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