PITTSBURGH – Jessica Meeker is not your average MBA. She’s a black-clad punk rock fanatic whose hair has seen more colors than a rainbow.
She’s also 18, and on Saturday she became the youngest student to receive a master’s in business administration from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, school officials said.
She’s not caught up in being a prodigy, though.
“It just feels so good to finally be done,” Meeker said Friday. “I have been in college for so long.”
At age 12, Meeker became the youngest student to enroll at Pennsylvania State University, and at 16 she was the youngest to earn a bachelor’s degree there, majoring in psychology.
Being a young teenager at a huge university wasn’t easy.
“I was a little kid,” she said. “Everyone was like, ‘What’s she doing here?’”
But Meeker thrived, enjoying the coffee shops and dorm life with the older students.
Frank Meeker, 49, and Leigh Meeker, 46, always knew their daughter was smart. She could spell at 18 months, and in first grade, after repeatedly complaining that she was bored, she was given an IQ test and scored in the 99.7 percentile, her mother said.
Meeker’s parents took her out of public school system and taught her at home in Bellefonte, 10 miles north of Penn State’s main campus.
Leigh said she is proud of her daughter, though watching her grow up has been bittersweet.
“She’s going to get her own place and not be our little girl anymore,” Leigh said. “She’s an adult now, and she’s going to go out on her own.”
What Meeker will move on to, however, is in question. She hasn’t received any job offers, and is considering earning a doctorate in psychology.
The director of the MBA program, Krish Krishnan, said Meeker would likely be successful at a company with younger management and an unorthodox style, or at a firm that targets teens.
“She knows her accounting, finance, marketing and business law,” Krishnan said. “And she has a mind-set and direct connect to those kind of businesses.”
Meeker joked that she would rather work at Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
“I’m addicted to sugar and Mountain Dew, and everyone tells me you should work in something you like,” she said.
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