At 11 years old, Athena Elling is doing what any normal pre-teens do: exploring her hobbies, taking care of her pets and hanging out with her family.
But unlike her peers, in a few days, she will also be a college graduate.
On Thursday, May 23, Elling, a San Juan Capistrano resident, will become the youngest student to graduate from Irvine Valley College. She will graduate as cum laude (which means she had a GPA of 3.50–3.74) with an associate’s degree in liberal arts.
And the person whose record she broke? Her brother, who graduated just last year.
Tycho Elling, Athena’s older brother, broke the record for the youngest IVC graduate at 11 years old but turned 12 just days after graduation. Athena Elling will turn 12 in seven months.
Last year, Tycho graduated with his associate’s degree in mathematics. Since then, he has been taking both undergraduate and graduate-level mathematics courses at UC Irvine, and this fall, he will start applying to doctoral programs.
“I know I’m supposed to say that learning is its own reward and it really kind of is, but also, as a second child, beating my older brother is kind of everything,” Athena Elling said.
Elling has been studying liberal arts at IVC, which covers a wide range of subjects including English, psychology, social studies and science, to name a few.
IVC offers limited courses to K-12 students who apply with the school’s permission, said Ruben Guzman, a registrar representative with the community college. After completing the courses IVC offers for K-12 students, Elling was admitted as a full-time student at the community college.
Elling said some of her favorite classes have been literature courses with IVC professor Melissa Knoll.
“My literature classes with Dr. Knoll introduced me to up-and-coming authors like Ling Ma and also introduced me to books like M.T. Anderson’s Feed, which felt like a frightening prediction of what our lives might be like if we become too addicted to technology,” Elling said.
Other courses Elling has enjoyed include abnormal psychology, Python coding, voice and diction and biology.
“My parents say that I should have a moratorium on declaring one major because whatever class I just finished is almost always my favorite class,” Elling said.
Outside of IVC, she enjoys sketching, soap-making and is a second-degree black belt in taekwondo. Elling loves spending her off days at Disneyland or catching an Angels game in Anaheim.
She also has a wide collection of what her mother, Christina Chow, calls “unusual pets” — two rescue chinchillas, several chickens, a king snake and, soon, a tarantula.
But other than academics and her many hobbies, one of her main passions is acting and modeling. Elling has been acting and modeling for a little more than a year and has already landed lots of gigs. Most recently, she worked with Ulta Beauty for an in-store advertising campaign.
“I love that in modeling and acting, you are only as good as your most recent self-tape or audition,” Elling said. “The bad news is that anything you accomplished last week is already in the past. It also means that if an audition did not go well, there is hopefully still another chance, another audition.”
Elling has always been independent in everything she does, Chow said, and this independence led her to take more classes at IVC and pursue jobs in acting and modeling.
In Elling’s master plan, she said she sees herself becoming an allergist or pursuing acting full-time. Education-wise, she envisions getting another associate’s degree — and then maybe one more after that.
“There are still so many classes I want to take,” Elling said. “I am signed up for more history and music classes over the summer, I have started on calculus and I think there are probably at least 30 more classes I really want to take before I am ready to commit to another major.”
Chow said that although they are not sure what Elling exactly wants to pursue after IVC, they know that “she wants to be the best at whatever it is.”
“When Athena was very young,” Chow said, “we once had a pretend argument over whether her father or mother was the boss of the family.”
“Athena’s answer was that Athena was the boss,” Chow said.
