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Alisa Perales is just 11 years old and about to earn two associate degrees
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Her dad, Rafael, left his full-time job a decade ago to help her focus on her academics when he realized she was “innately brilliant”
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The years of homeschooling have paid off, the family says: “It’s just cool,” Alisa says
This week, Alisa Perales will graduate from Crafton Hills College in Yucaipa, Calif., with associate degrees in both math and multiple sciences. She’s planning to study at University of California, Irvine, starting this fall and major in computer science.
She’s also 11 years old. Honestly, she thinks the whole thing is pretty neat.
“It’s really exciting for me that I’m actually graduating at 11 with two degrees,” Alisa Perales tells PEOPLE. “It’s just cool.”
Alisa’s single dad, 51-year-old Rafael Perales, decided to shelve his law practice and homeschool his daughter full-time starting when she was only a year old. (The family was able to rely on a relatively modest inheritance after Rafael’s parents died, which he says allowed them to purchase some land and generate income that way.)
“Alisa is innately brilliant. She’s sharp. Everybody’s noticed that she was born with a little something extra,” he says.
Still, “she wasn’t born knowing calculus, she wasn’t born knowing [trigonometry],” Rafael tells PEOPLE. Getting from there to here — a college graduate at close to half the age of most students — was “constant work.”
Courtesy Rafael Perales
Rafael (left) and Alisa Perales
They started with the the ABCs and singing songs. By 2½, Alisa was reading chapter books.
“It’s just been step by step,” her father says. “There’s been no miracles. Everything has been step by step by step.”
“When I first started doing it, people were like, ‘Wow, you’re going to stop being a lawyer to homeschool a 1-year-old?’ ” Rafael says. “They thought it was a big mistake. They didn’t think that was really the way to go.”
But he was sure it was “the right decision from the start,” he says. “And looking back now, 10 years later, I have zero regrets. It has been a joy. It has been a privilege and an honor teaching her.”
At their home in San Bernadino, Calif., the Peraleses initially studied from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. six days a week.
“We didn’t take any summer breaks, we didn’t take any winter breaks,” Rafael says. Instead, in the summer, the pair took educational field trips to places such as the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone. (They did, though, pause for holidays like the Fourth of July, Christmas and their birthdays.)
When Alisa turned 4, they decided to take Wednesdays off from studying and make a weekly trip to Disneyland.
“She was doing so well, I wanted to keep rewarding her and have her look forward to every week as something new and a lot of fun that’s coming up,” Rafael says. “That was really my strategy, just to make it a heck of a lot of fun.”
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By the time Alisa was 5, her dad was teaching her algebra. Then they moved on to geometry.
When she was 8 years old, Alisa got to the point where, her father says, he couldn’t teach her the math she wanted to learn — not because he didn’t want her to learn but because “I don’t know how to do calculus. I don’t really know how to do trigonometry,” he says.
So when most kids were enrolling in third grade, Alisa was enrolled in community college, as a special student, in spring 2023.
“It was the first time she was ever in any kind of a public classroom [and] I thought she might be a little intimidated,” Rafael says. “But no, I think she really looked forward to having other people around in class and get to actually experience what it’s like having someone besides dad up in the front of the room teaching everybody.”
He continues: “It was like on TV, or in the movies to her. She had no problems. I did not hear even one time and not even once did she come to me and say, ‘I feel uncomfortable,’ or, ‘Nobody is being nice to me’ or anything like that.”
Courtesy Rafael Perales
Alisa Perales
During Alisa’s classes, Rafael waited nearby on campus.
“There’s a lot more students in our classroom. I’m used to me and my dad sitting at the desk. It’s just many more people,” Alisa says. “Also — just way older than me, of course.”
While she liked her math, physics and music classes, she says, in general “I like learning new things.”
On Friday, May 23, she will become the community college’s youngest grad, earning two associate degrees, one in math and one in multiple sciences. Her dad notes that if she stayed just one more semester, she would have earned two more degrees, in computer science and in physics.
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“We’re not done yet,” Rafael says.
Alisa is interested in 3D animation, artificial intelligence and space exploration (she says she would like to help Elon Musk colonize Mars or live on the Moon).
“She wants to go into space,” Rafael says, joking that “she wants to drag me out there, too.”
Read the original article on People
