Develin says he notices the age difference between himself and the rest of his classmates.

"Everyone here is a bit wiser than I am. I have to learn to be more mature," he says. "People here are more focused, while I'm always changing my mind.... I can't keep my mind straight on any one thing."

Despite the age differences, Develin says he is glad he made the decision to come to Harvard.

"I had no reason not to go to college," he says. "Yeah, I could have taken a year off but I'd just be really bored. Being dirt poor I can't go traveling or anything. I would have just stayed home otherwise."

His mother, Wonbok Lee, says she was anxious to send him to college so he could be challenged academically. In fact, she says she hoped he would forgo his senior year in high school to attend college at 15.

"I was afraid that Michael would be too bored at high school," she says. "I warned him that it's hard to waste a year and be bored. We had professors of mathematics telling us not that he should go to college at 16, but that he should attend grad school at 16."

In the end, though, Lee let her son decide for himself when he would start college.

"He was afraid that at age 15 people would know him as 'the kid,'" she says. "He didn't want to throw that block in front of him."

Although he rushed through the public education system at Stuyvesant to graduate high school at age 15, Develin says he intends to take his time at Harvard.

"Everybody wants to get through everything so quickly here," he says. "There's really no need."

Fittin' In

Michael R. Brauwerman '00 also entered Harvard at age 16, but says he fits in with the Class of 2000 just fine.

"It's just like we're all the same age," he says.

Brauwerman offers an explanation as to why the transition has been so easy despite his youth: "The error range between maturity and age is such that people act older and younger than they are. And we're all distributed between 16 and 20, so we all get along well."

But he says several minor social problems have plagued his early entrance to college.