13-year-old Long Island prodigy set for NYU master’s program

A 13-year-old boy from Long Island is on track to begin a graduate program at New York University next fall — a milestone most Americans don’t reach until their early 30s.

Joe Petraro-Hyppolite, who says he has an IQ of 168, has been accepted into NYU’s Master of Science in Sports Business, a 36-credit program run through the school’s Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport, according to a CBS News New York report. He is still completing his undergraduate degree at Louisiana State University and expects to finish in May.

Petraro-Hyppolite described his coming studies more broadly than the program’s official curriculum.

“My master’s is going to be sports management, but other [than] that, it’s also kinesiology and biology,” he told CBS. NYU’s published bulletin for the Sports Business MS lists core and elective coursework in sports law, finance and economics, analytics, and media and marketing — it does not include kinesiology or biology components, so that part of his description couldn’t be independently confirmed.

“My IQ is 168,” Petraro-Hyppolite said when asked about his academic pace. Asked whether that made him a genius, he replied: “I am not biased, but, yeah, if you say so. Whenever I tell people, it’s like, ’Oh, Young Sheldon, Doogie Howser.’”

His academic timeline has been unusual from the start. He scored a 1590 on the SAT at age 10 and earned his high school diploma at 11, before enrolling at LSU. Classmates there, he said, often do a double take when they learn his age: “They shot like a double glance, like, ’Wait, what?’”

Despite the accelerated pace, Petraro-Hyppolite pushed back on the idea that his abilities make schoolwork effortless. “It’s not like I was shot out the womb knowing everything I know,” he said. “I have to learn it once or twice. Then I’ll know.”

His mother, Anne Petraro-Hyppolite, said the NYU acceptance carries extra weight because her son was once placed in special-education classes after being diagnosed with Tourette syndrome. “It’s just surreal,” she said. “When he graduated high school so young, it was surreal, but this is … everything he does is surreal. He just loves to learn. He is like a sponge.”

Outside the classroom, Petraro-Hyppolite volunteers at a nursing home in the Five Towns area of Long Island, where he has helped residents get home safely. He said he ultimately hopes to work in paleontology, even as he pursues a business-focused master’s degree.

If his timeline holds, Petraro-Hyppolite will finish his master’s degree at NYU at roughly the same age most of his peers are getting their driver’s licenses.