(Trinidad Guardian) Over the years, Sanjeev Mahabir’s love for knowledge has grown to significant heights.
At just 19 years, Mahabir is heading to Germany to complete his Master’s programme, after which he plans to earn the title of ‘The youngest holder of a PhD in the Caribbean’ by the age of 23.
However, although he loves knowledge, Mahabir said he does not enjoy sitting in a classroom since he has always been several pages ahead in the curriculum.
“I think when I was around Form Three, I just found that school was going a bit too slow so I started learning on my own and I got the Form Six textbooks in Form Three,” he told Guardian Media during an interview at his home in Tunapuna.
A past student of Hillview College, Mahabir wrote the SATs, CAPE and CSEC exams all in one academic year.
By age 17, he attended the University of Colorado Boulder where he pursued his passion for Physics. By 19, he graduated with three majors. including Mathematics and Philosophy.
“I did this by regularly taking the maximum number of credit hours per semester, taking summer semesters—meaning only one-week breaks instead of three months between semesters—and sometimes getting permission to go above the credit limit, doing more than 21 credits in a semester. Furthermore, I was able to do several graduate level (Master and PhD) courses as an undergraduate. These included Einstein’s General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, Geometry of Quantum Fields and Strings, Plasma Physics, Formal Logic,” he said.
“I was able to do an honours thesis which was above the level of a typical undergraduate. My thesis was in the field of Hydrodynamics in Quantum Field Theories. Quantum field theory is something which you only learn as a PhD student and I started this thesis before I took the Quantum field theory course at CU. Therefore, I was self-taught in the topics relevant to my thesis. My thesis is titled “Transport Coefficients for Arbitrary Coupling in the Massless O(N) Model” and my main result was three exact expressions for transport coefficients. Exact expressions of this kind are notoriously difficult to come about and so it was quite the achievement,” he added.
He leaves for Germany next week for a M.Sc. programme in Mathematical Physics at the University of Hamburg.
“It’s a two-year program in Science, Mathematical Physics at the University of Hamburg,” he noted.
Mahabir said he has never allowed himself to be deprived of a healthy social life.
“Even though I was studying CAPE and CSEC at the same time, Cambridge SATs and all of these things at the same time, every weekend I was still with my friends. Well, not every weekend but I still got to lime and have nights out,” he said.
He admitted that while his parents were always very proud of his achievements, they were also concerned that he would eventually “burn out”. However, he said they never discouraged him. Instead, they supported every step of the way.
Mahabir believes he has a lot to offer scholars like himself. It is why he wants to be a professor.
“I think as a professor I will be better, not as a teacher but as an adviser to students wanting to do their thesis and whatever research they would like to do because I understand that not every student needs to follow the guidelines laid out in terms of guidelines. So as an adviser, I think I could assist them greatly,” he explained.
Asked what advice he would give to others, Mahabir said, “If you aim to enjoy what you do, then you will never have to work a day in your life.”
