At age 12, his favorite Child, Carlos Antonio Santamaria will travel to the University of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) on Monday to begin studies in biomedical physics, becoming the youngest student to join this prestigious University of Mexico.
“My main goal is […] to provide the basics for doctors and biologists to solve our biological problems,” Carlos explains in front of a forest of microphones and cameras, during a press conference at UNAM.
“If we manage to make a cell that is maintained alone organelle organite, then we can treat all diseases,” he says with a broad smile, which reveals milk teeth recently fallen.
This student, endowed with “high cognitive capacities” according to the UNAM, will begin Monday a license of biomedical physics. However, he does not like being called “genius”.
He says he will enter university with a “thirst for learning”. But his mother, impatient at his side, would especially like him to eat his snack.
“I’ll go to class with my stuffed”, a puma, mascot of the football club of this university, says Carlos to AFP.
Although football is not his passion, he supports the university team. He prefers, however, construction games and video games.
When he is not immersed in his study books, he also likes reading popular science literature or classical literature.
“The other day, I read Don Quixote and Hundred Years of Solitude, ” he says, his blue glasses around his neck.
He will join the thirty or so students selected for this course on approximately 700 postulants.
To get there, his journey was not easy.
If the company of adults is nice to him, the relationship with other children “is a little more difficult,” says the boy.
He suffered a “hostile atmosphere” in the schools where he attended before finally graduating from the National Institute of Adult Education.
“He had to take adult exams,” which is also not normal, complains his father Fabian.
“It would take exams for children,” said his father, who had to fight with the administration to get the right to pass the baccalaureate.
Carlos would like his university “to welcome a group of children like him, to give a test to all the children who want to enroll”.
The prodigy believes that Mexico is “in the storm”, mainly because of “lack of education”.
He asked the elected president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, “not to commit the mistakes of these predecessors” and asked MEPs “to think more about minorities”.