Four years after making history as the youngest student of Florida A&M University (FAMU), senior Curtis Lawrence III is set to graduate this spring at age 20, still the youngest in his class.
“The four years that I’ve been here, I’ve done a lot and I’ve changed a lot as a person, and I’m prepared to go on to the next chapter,” Lawrence told the Tallahassee Democrat.
At age 10 while most boys were thinking of the latest video game, Curtis was taking his SATs. He then set his eyes on attending an HBCU after receiving more than $1.6 million in college scholarships and being accepted into top colleges and universities in the country including George Washington University, Hampton, Harvard, Howard, Morehouse, Morgan, North Carolina A&T, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, and Yale.
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He graduated from DC’s School Without Walls, a public magnet school, and started taking early college classes through a special program at George Washington University when he was just 14 years old before entering FAMU as a junior.
He started FAMU to major in biology and computer science with a minor in Mandarin. However, along the way, he chose to pursue a minor in liberal arts instead.
“The support that I have from the university is one of the main reasons why I ended up choosing to come here,” Lawrence said. “The level of community is unique to FAMU and HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities) in general. Whatever problem I have, there’s always someone I can go to.”
Now, Lawrence is getting ready to graduate from FAMU’s College of Science and Technology on May 3. From FAMU, he will head to Villanova University in Pennsylvania as a Presidential Fellow in a two-year biology master’s program.
Lawrence said he initially wanted to become a paleontologist but changed his mind as his interest in ecology and evolutionary biology grew. He is also looking at a career in academia so as to teach or do outreach and also conduct research, he told the Tallahassee Democrat.
One of the individuals at FAMU who helped Lawrence to succeed was University Scholarship Program Director Dedra O’Neal.
“We don’t get to engage students of Curtis’s caliber on a day-to-day basis,” O’Neal said of Lawrence. “I’m so proud of him and am thankful that his parents entrusted Florida A&M University with their 16-year-old son.”
Lawrence learned to read by age two from his mother. Both parents are educators with two gifted sons. “My mom just always pushed education, pushed advanced academics and especially being at the elementary school in Harlem, I was surrounded by other people who were advanced, so it just felt like the norm for me,” Lawrence said.
The gifted boy’s mother, Malene Lawrence, said her son has “loved dinosaurs and paleontology literally since he was one. And some people think, ‘Oh, your kid is going to grow out of that.’ But you foster that love of whatever it is.”
“So we’d keep dinosaur books. Like, we kept tons of nonfiction books in the car, and he would be pronouncing the names of dinosaurs and I was like, ‘How does this kid know this?’”
Apart from taking the SATs at age 10, he also studied abroad in China, where he stayed with a Chinese family and improved his Mandarin, according to wtop.com.
His parents are supportive of his ambitions and knew from the onset he wanted to take it to the doctorate level. And that is what they have been working towards as a family.
Lawrence is ever grateful to his parents for instilling in him the “love for learning” and the chance to advance himself in academia.
