A 12-year-old Indian-American boy was congratulated by the US President Barack Obama after becoming the youngest ever to graduate from American River College. He is a Sacramento student who already has three college degrees in maths, science and foreign language studies. He has been accepted to two University of California campuses.

The boy is planning to study biomedical engineering and become a doctor and medical researcher by the time he turns 18. His name is Tanishq Abraham. While a boy at 12 usually struggles with his first lessons in algebra, but Tanishq is a prodigy and made his way into the record books as one of the youngest ever to graduate.

He joined MENSA, the prestigious high-IQ society when he was just 4. “We tested him and discovered that he was pretty smart,” his father, Bijou Abraham said. Barack Obama sent him a congratulatory letter for his achievement at just 12.

“I think I’ll be 18 when I get my MD (medical degree),” the boy quoted. Home-schooled since the age of seven, he passed a state exam in March in 2014 that certified that he had met the appropriate academic standards to receive his high school diploma.

Abraham had first asked his parents – father Bijou Abraham, a software engineer and mother Taji who is a veterinary doctor – to allow him to take a college course when he was six years old. “Lots of professors, they didn’t really want me in their classes because I was too young,” he said.

Tanishq says child geniuses are often seen as odd. “When you think of a genius, you think of a mad scientist kind of thing,” he said.