Alexandre D’Souza, like other high school students across the GTA, is gearing up for his prom and graduation ceremony and spending the summer excited about embarking on his post-secondary education.

But unlike most who are university-bound, D’Souza will be just 14 when he starts a double biological- and chemical-engineering degree this fall at McMaster University in Hamilton.

The school’s admissions department does not collect information of its first-year entrants by age so it is unable to say whether D’Souza is the youngest student ever admitted to the university. However, Art Heidebrecht, McMaster’s acting dean of engineering, says he can’t recall an admission of someone that young in the nearly 50 years he’s been at the school.

“It's very rare,” Heidebrecht told the Star. The engineering program typically receives more than 3,000 applicants. “The fact that he knows which program he wants to go into, he’s obviously very motivated . . . I doubt he’ll have any difficulty.”

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D’Souza — tall, polite and friendly — shrugs off his youthfulness and plays down his academic record.

“I don’t really like being judged by people by my age,” he says Monday evening sitting in the living room of his family’s Mississauga home. “I’ve always been younger and had no problem socially.”

McMaster was his first choice and he was thrilled to accept the offer when it came in February.

Proud father Alfredo explains the family moved to Canada from India last year. Daughters Annalise, 23, Alexia, 21, are also high academic achievers pursuing post graduate and a double math/business degree respectively.

Their little brother “was always a star student,” says Alfredo, who works in business development.

Prior to coming to Canada, D’Souza studied in Bahrain, Singapore and Mumbai, India, where he completed Grade 10 with distinction in all subjects.

When he was 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.”

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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.