Esther Okade, a 10-year-old from Walsall, England has just become one of the country’s youngest college freshmen after enrolling at Open University, a UK-based distance learning college.
Okade, a math prodigy, first began her freshman year in January 2018 and is already the top of her class, scoring a 100 percent in a recent exam, according to CNN.
“I want to (finish the course) in two years. Then I’m going to do my PhD in financial maths when I’m 13,” she said. “I want to have my own bank by the time I’m 15 because I like numbers and I like people and banking is a great way to help people.”
Esther OkadeOkade originally wanted to begin her undergraduate years when she was seven, but her mother told her she was too young. After begging her mother for three years, she was finally allowed to look into the idea.
Okade has been ahead of her peers before. She took her first Math GSCE exam, equivalent to the American GRE exam, at just six years old and earned a C. She went back and retook the test and received an A-grade a year later.
Okade’s mother first noticed her daughter’s intelligence after she began homeschooling her when she was three years old. Okade’s parents decided to enroll her in a private school, but after a couple of weeks noticed changes in Okade after saying the school doesn’t “even let me talk!”
She began learning basic numbers from her mother, but by the time she was four, her knowledge of math had expanded so much that she began to learn algebra and quadratic equations.
