She’s the ultimate quick study
At just 19, Vancouver woman earns a master’s degree from Ivy League school
For most 19-year-olds, graduate school is something they’re only just beginning to consider. But for Vancouver’s Rachel Lin, she can already stop thinking about it. She’s finished. In May, Lin graduated from Columbia University’s Teachers College with a master’s degree in neuroscience and education. She turns 20 next month.
Lin, who was born in Taiwan before moving to Vancouver at age two, finished high school early through the University of British Columbia’s university transition program, which prepares high-performing students for early entrance to university.
“After Grade 7, I tested into this program, so instead of going into Grade 8, I went to Grade 11 with 20 other students who were in my shoes,” Lin said.
After skipping three grades, Lin graduated at 14. At 15, she began studying at UBC.
“I did my bachelor’s (degree) in neuroscience,” she said. “I was really interested in the applications of it. I always wanted to use neuroscience knowledge for something more than just lab purposes.”
Lin earned a four-year degree, taking the whole four years to do it. She said she could have finished early, had she not chosen to take a semester off.
However, her semester off was actually a semester at sea, as she combined her desire to see the world — 10 countries — with her unflappable dedication to sprinting through a scholastic journey that often takes the rest of us our entire youth.
When her time at UBC was finished, Lin began studying at Columbia University.
“I went to Columbia because that’s one of the only programs in the world that fused neuroscience and education together.”
Of course, as a chronic go-getter, Lin began her studies at Columbia before she was finished at UBC, diving right into the work before her UBC graduation ceremony.
“I started in May,” she said. “I got a leg up by taking classes and starting my research project during the summer.”
That allowed Lin to complete the program in just one year.
“My mentality is, if I can finish it, then I’ll just finish it,” she said, before shrugging off the Ivy League graduate school’s high degree of difficulty.
“To be perfectly frank, there wasn’t that much required of me. I’m used to taking a lot of credits at one time. It was a very course-heavy master’s. I did some research on the side, I did a thesis by the end of it, but I have done a lot of that work before at UBC, so I was really used to doing a lot of work at one time.”
Did Lin’s young age ever become an issue? Only when she allowed it to become one, she explained.
“I thought about my own age a lot. That hindered my ability to make friends, not my age itself.
“When I let that go, I made a lot of friends, I joined a lot of clubs, I did a lot of orientations mentorship,” she said. Lin kept mum when others started asking around.
“When I went to Columbia, in their orientation speech, they said, ‘Oh, and our oldest student is 63 and our youngest student is 18.’
“Everyone gasped and looked around, trying to figure out who the 18-year-old was. Everyone in my major, on the first day of class, they were asking around, ‘Oh, who’s the 18-year-old?’
“Someone looked directly at me and asked, ‘Do you think that person sitting in the front is the 18-yearold?’ ”
Lin isn’t slowing down either. Later this month, she leaves for Taiwan, where she’ll immediately start using her degree, teaching high school science and English at an international school.
“I’m actually pretty excited about that,” she said.
“Teaching high schoolers will be an interesting experience, considering I’m only a couple years older than them.”
“Teaching high schoolers will be an interesting experience, considering I’m only a couple years older than them.” — RACHEL LIN HOLDER OF A MASTER’S DEGREE AT AGE 19