Teen finishes college in 18 months

Wisconsin’s home to Johnny Lechner, the notorious college student who has yet to graduate after 13 years.

We’ve got Chirag Shah.

Shah breezed through his studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago in just a year and a half. And he got a 3.9 GPA on barely an hour a day of studying.

The 19-year-old explained that college mostly seemed like a “review” from his days at Barrington High School, where he took so many advanced courses, he was able to start as a junior at UIC.

“I just had a lot of free time,” said Shah, who is jokingly referred to as “the brainiac” by friends. “I’d do different activities every day, spend a lot of time at the beach.”

Shah, a biology major, had been accepted at UIC’s advanced seven-year medical program when he first enrolled in college.

But because students in the rigorous track are required to wait at least three years before starting, Shah has to wait. So he’s keeping himself busy hanging out with pals, playing sports, attending rock concerts, and dancing the traditional Indian garba dance of his parents’ homeland.

And then there’s law school at John Marshall, where he’s a first-year student.

“At first, it was really intimidating because I was meeting people in my class who were 30, married or had kids,” Shah said. “But you get over it because you realize that you’re all in the same boat learning the same things.”

The teenager still wants to pursue a career in medicine, but he figures with a law degree, he’ll also be an expert in health and malpractice law.

Shah was the salutatorian of his high school class. His older brother, Jai, 26, was valedictorian of his class. and his sister Kavita, now 23, graduated in the top 5 percent of hers.

The former Barrington track and cross-country star insists he isn’t gifted and needed extra work on his spelling when he was younger. His parents, Shah said, just made sure he and his siblings weren’t slipping in school and encouraged them to have fun instead of being holed up in their rooms studying all day.

“It really is a lot of time management,” Shah said of the secrets to his academic success. “It’s not as hard as it seems.”

Source: suntimes.com