BATON ROUGE, LA. — A 14-year-old whiz kid who scored a composite 30 on the ACT, Polite Stewart Jr., was recruited by Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford universities, but decided to attend historically Black Southern University at Baton Rouge.
“They are all very good schools, don’t get me wrong. But one of the ‘cons’ is that you’re just one in a number. Many of the classes are so big that you probably won’t even get to know your teacher,” the gifted youngster says.
“Here at Southern, it’s one on one,” he says.
The son of two school teachers, Stewart was home-schooled at his Baton Rouge home until the age of 10, when he began attending academic programs at Southern University. Stewart started with the Garrett A. Morgan/Ford PAS Summer Business Institute, a program designed to teach the fine points of operating a business, including finance. He went on to enroll in Timbuktu Academy, a national model program at Southern University that mentors pre-college, undergraduate and graduate students in math, science, and engineering. He says Timbuktu Academy did more than give him individual attention and teach him the skills to succeed on the college level.
“Timbuktu gave me a huge amount of assignments, and their assignments are comparable to honors-level. So to enroll in regular classes here at Southern really isn’t much of a change,” Stewart says.
Stewart says he used to being the youngest student in his classes.
“It really doesn’t bother me, because I’ve been around older kids and adults all my life,” Stewart says, noting that most of the youngsters at Timbuktu were at least four years older than him.
