Kim Rosen has a plan for her friend Dominique Duncan.

“I’m waiting for her to win the Nobel Prize in math,” Rosen said. “She’ll become famous and take all of her friends on a cruise.”

Duncan will graduate today from Free State High School, but her sights have been on bigger goals for years.

She’s been taking classes at Kansas University since she was 12 and already has 99 hours of college credit under her belt. That’s enough to classify her as a KU junior. She’s received preliminary acceptance to graduate school at Stanford University when she finishes her bachelor’s degree in two years from the University of Chicago.

Duncan has led such a double life for years. She would lead cheers, compete in tennis and play the cello with her junior high and high school peers, then do complicated research at KU to predict epileptic seizures. All the while, she never received grades lower than an A in her classes.

“My friends think I’m a big dork,” Duncan said. “They just think I take school way too seriously.”

Math wizard

Duncan is the daughter of Tyrone Duncan and Bozenna Pasik-Duncan, both math professors at KU. During their daughter’s fourth-grade year, the couple took a year sabbatical and moved to Europe, enrolling Dominique in schools in Poland and France.

“Here, I was considered gifted,” Duncan said. “There, I was behind two years.”

When she returned to Lawrence, Duncan was motivated to learn as much as she could, especially in math. Her first class at KU was beginning college algebra, which she took when she was in sixth grade.

Her age wasn’t an issue in the class, she said, but it came up during a conversation after the final exam.

“A guy walked out with me, and we were talking about the exam,” she said. “He said, ‘Hey, do you want to get a beer?’ And I said, ‘Um, I’m 12.'”

Dominique Duncan is graduating from Free State High School with nearly 100 college hours to her credit.

She continued adding to her KU class load while taking a full class load in junior high and high school. She had a reduced class schedule at Free State her senior year, though she took 19 hours this spring from KU — four more hours than the average full-time KU student took.

Duncan took most of the math courses KU offered. She began taking graduate-level classes while she was in junior high. She also has taken classes in several languages, including Latin, Polish, Italian and French.

“We could never stop her,” her mother said. “It was getting worse and worse — she couldn’t take just one class, then two classes, then three or four. We gave up on discouraging her. She was enjoying herself.”

She also began using calculus to study brain waves in an attempt to predict seizures in people with epilepsy. She’s received several undergraduate research awards at KU, and this summer a $5,000 grant from the National Science Foundation will finance her work.

No regrets

Many of Duncan’s classmates at Free State probably aren’t aware of her collegiate life.

“I don’t know how well known that is,” said Sharon Stice, a counselor at the school. “It’s not her way to brag about things. She seems like any other high school senior.”

Rosen, who also will graduate today from Free State, said Duncan retained a relatively typical high school life despite her busy schedule.

“It’s amazing how she prioritizes,” Rosen said. “She’s so busy, but she makes time to hang out with us every weekend. Even if she has to get up early in the morning, she’ll come out for an hour or two.”

And she said Duncan didn’t talk much about her KU life.

“I think it’s amazing,” Rosen said. “I can’t even believe it. I have problems with my normal high school classes, but she’s able to take classes at Free State and KU. I have no clue how she does it.”

Duncan was on the cheerleading squad as a freshman and on the tennis team as a sophomore. But those commitments proved too much with her class work and research.

Sometimes she wonders what life would have been like with only one set of classes in junior high or high school.

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“But I don’t really regret it,” she said. “I still make time for my friends.”

‘A new challenge’

Although she’s less than a year away from graduating at KU, Duncan plans to attend the University of Chicago in the fall, where she’ll major in mathematics and classic languages, with a possible minor in Slavic languages. Most of her credits will transfer.

She considered finishing her KU degree, then going away for graduate school.

“That’s what a lot of people wanted me to do,” she said. “I need to change for a while. It’ll be a new challenge up there.”

After completing her degrees in Chicago, which should take about two years, she’ll go to graduate school.

Duncan still is considering her long-term goals She might follow her parents into academia. Or she could focus on her epilepsy research.

Bozenna Pasik-Duncan said that while her daughter already has started her college career, today’s Free State commencement ceremony would be an important event for her daughter. Pasik-Duncan’s mother flew in from Poland for the event, and a professor from Charles University in Prague who met Dominique as a child also is coming.

“I think Dominique could have finished high school a long time ago,” Pasik-Duncan said. “But there’s an incredible consistency about Dominique. She started high school with a particular group of students, and she wanted to finish with them. She’s always faithful to everything she does.”