She’s Only 14, but More Than Ready to Hit the College Books

FULLERTON —  The mother and daughter sit not two feet apart at a table at Cal State Fullerton, and it’s clear the two still live in vastly different worlds.

It is more than a generation 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 put a little girl from Idyllwild in college.

Shawna Carlson on Tuesday will 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.

“She was my first child,” said Cheryl Carlson, Shawna’s mother. “I thought it was normal . . . how smart she was, how she was walking when she was 7 months . . . It took a while to realize what we were dealing with. But here we are.”

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

Does she have trepidation about attending a four-year school?

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

Shawna defies stereotypes. She is not a geek; friends come to her birthday parties. She fights with her two younger sisters over compact discs. It’s hard to tell when folks realized Shawna’s mind contained such multitudes. It could have been when she walked before crawling. Or when she began reading adult books at 4. Or when she balanced the family’s finances 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. She was in another world. She was 7.”

Wants to Pursue a Career in Law

Shawna has read George Orwell’s “1984” 10 times. She read “War and Peace” twice, but the book bored her. For a while, computers tweaked her mind. Her job last summer was to help an Idyllwild man build Web sites and computers.

She built a PC 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 wants to be a criminal prosecutor.

But with her brains, why Cal State Fullerton and not Harvard or UCLA?

Cheryl Carlson and her 39-year-old husband Doug, a roofer, 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.

Beyond that, the parents say, they weren’t aware of scholarships and grants that could help her.

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