Girl, 14, Finds College Life Is Kid’s Stuff

The mother and daughter sit less than two feet apart at a table at Cal State Fullerton, and it’s clear the two live in vastly different worlds. It is more than a generational gap.

The mother, a waitress, is 35, and the daughter, a genius, is 14. But today the two somehow are closer than ever, partly because the high school-educated mother perused her daughter’s textbooks for the first time, but mostly because it’s the day they’ve come to Orange County to enroll a teen from Idyllwild in college.

Shawna Carlson--with butternut-brown hair in pigtails and blue eyes that telegraph a mind well ahead of everybody else’s--will on Tuesday become the youngest person ever to attend Cal State Fullerton full time. To boot, she’s entering as a junior and taking five classes, one more than a full load.

Said Cheryl Carlson, Shawna’s mother: “She was my first child. I thought it was normal . . . how smart she was, how she was walking when she was seven months. It took awhile to realize what we were dealing with. But here we are.”

The eldest of three daughters, Shawna is the only one so academically advanced.

‘I Don’t Feel Any Pressure Now’

Shawna--who uses phrases such as “layered contextual stuff” and out of boredom slept through classes at Mount San Jacinto College in Walnut, where she earned an associate’s degree in social behavioral studies this year--will continue to live with her parents in a mobile home in the mountain community of Idyllwild in Riverside County. But three days a week, she’ll live with her grandmother in Fullerton, taking classes two days and studying the other.

Does she have trepidation about attending a four-year university? Shawna answers: “When I was [in community college] I didn’t really understand pressures or that I was different from other people in class. I was studying. I don’t feel any pressure now.”

Shawna says she might not be old enough to know the pressures of being so young at a university. All the better, she says. “I’m here for the teachers.”

Shawna defies stereotypes. She is not a geek, so intelligent she’s incapable of relating to her peers. Friends come to her birthday parties. She fights with her sisters over compact discs. But she also is quirky: With a book, she enters another world, her mother says, unfazed by a yapping Dachshund or a mother’s scoldings. Cheryl Carlson says there is a five-foot “aura” around the girl when she is focused.

It’s hard to tell when folks realized Shawna’s mind contained such faculties. It could have been when the girl walked before crawling. Or when she began reading adult books at age 4. Or when Shawna balanced the family’s budget before she was 10. But her mother figures the realization might have come the day Shawna was reading some fat book on the couch. “I couldn’t go near her,” Cheryl Carlson said. “She was in another world. She was 7.”

Shawna has read George Orwell’s “1984” 10 times, underlining and cross-referencing passages each time. She read “War and Peace” twice, but the book bored her.

At one point, computers piqued her interest. For several years, Shawna planned on a career in computer science. She worked last summer with an Idyllwild man who built Web sites and computers. She built a personal computer from scratch. But that eventually bored her too. She didn’t want “a life in a cubicle behind a computer. Ugh.”

And so she wants to become a lawyer. She’s majoring in political science and political justice and hopes to be a prosecutor.

Shawna’s parents are paying for her education and saving money to give her a laptop, something she’s wanted since she was 7.

But with her brains, why is she at Cal State Fullerton instead of Harvard or UCLA?

Cheryl Carlson and her 39-year-old husband, Doug, a roofer, said they weren’t aware of scholarships and grants that could have helped her to attend a more expensive university. Cheryl and Shawna rolled their eyes at the oversight.

Besides, the Carlsons said they simply don’t want their daughter that far away, or in a town without relatives, or in a city whose harshness would break a small-town girl.

“Right now, 2 1/2 hours in good traffic is bad enough,” Cheryl Carlson said. “I couldn’t put her in L.A. either. Who knows what could happen to her there?”