When he was a nine-year-old schoolboy in Bahrain, D'Souza scored the highest marks worldwide in English and mathematics in an international exam.

D'Souza's mother, Neomi, recalls her infant son sitting in front of the computer in diapers.

"We just couldn't get him off it," she says. He spent hours "self-learning," using online education programs and playing Battle Chess, a videogame version of chess. "He soaked in the information."

Before starting school — which he did before his third birthday — D'Souza taught himself Arabic numbers walking around a complex in Singapore with a housemaid "just by looking at English."

He piled up academic awards and stellar report cards, now bound together in a large blue binder. Last year, D'Souza amassed seven A-pluses and two As, the latter in chemistry and economics, "a subject I'd never done before," the teenager notes almost ruefully.

But this prodigy also makes time for fun, when he's not tutoring math to other students at St. Marcellinus Secondary School. He loves playing soccer, video games and piano.

Ideally, he would live at home rather than in residence — both for financial reasons and because of his age — but the family is confident he'll be in a safe and secure environment after meeting with McMaster housing officials. "They suggested a smaller, quieter residence," says his dad.

Heidebrecht says there will be many challenges for a student this young.

"The individual — being not only bright and already coping with high school — has obviously faced some challenges in social relationships and so forth. I'm sure he's quite capable of handling himself. However, we pay a lot of attention to students who come in unusual situations."

D'Souza is not sure what he intends to do after he graduates — which could be when he is 18, typically the age students start post-secondary education in Ontario. "Maybe medical research, I'm not 100 per cent sure," he says.

Torstar News