Alina Zheng of Lawrence, who graduated from Kansas University in December at age 16, talks about being a younger-than-average student and what she plans to do next.

Most people Alina Zheng encountered at Kansas University didn’t seem to notice anything unusual about her age.

“I usually don’t tell them right away because I don’t want them to freak out and treat me any differently,” she said. But if anyone did ask, she said, of course she was always honest.

Alina is 16, and she just graduated from KU.

She got her degree in two and a half years, after enrolling as a full-time student at age 14.

Alina is quick to point out her college experience wasn’t much different from most of her peers’. She studied a lot, and classes were hard at times. She lived on campus in Watkins Scholarship Hall, cooked her own meals with her roommates (who included, one semester, her 20-year-old sister Amy), and got involved with campus activities.

Now, she has an internship she hopes will help her decide what to do with her life.

“The bigger goal in mind for me is to figure out what I really want to do and start my career,” she said.

Alina isn’t the first 16-year-old to graduate from KU, but students like her are rare.

She is the first 16-year-old to earn a degree since spring 1995, according to KU spokesman Andy Hyland. He said KU has had an average of three full-time degree-seeking students age 16 or younger on campus each semester since fall 2003.

Chris Wiles, Alina’s Honors Program adviser at KU, said Alina was probably the most mature of the many accelerated students he’d worked with.

“She has continued to excel, pursuing multiple majors and graduating early, while participating in a number of opportunities beyond the classroom,” Wiles said. “She is obviously incredibly gifted, but she is also a wonderful young woman, and generally just a very pleasant person. For all of her talents, none of it would be possible if she weren’t a tireless, dedicated worker as well.”

Alina plans to move to Washington, D.C., in the coming week, where she has a spring internship with the U.S. Department of State, pending her passing her security clearance. The internship is through a KU program, and she’ll be living in an apartment with a couple of other students.

Afterward, she figures she’ll take one of two paths: academia, going to graduate school for political science with the hopes of one day becoming a professor, or perhaps working for the government in an area such as foreign service.

She hopes the internship will help her “test the waters.”

At some point, she also wants to live in China, where she studied abroad as an undergrad. The goal, she said, would be to solidify her fluency in the language, which she first learned some of from her parents, KU aerospace engineering professor Charlie Zheng and Lawrence High School integrated studies educator Shirley Zheng, both immigrants from China.

At KU, Alina majored in political science with minors in math and economics.

She was able to complete her degree in less than three years, graduating in December, thanks to college credits she had earned as a student at Lawrence’s Free State High School.

And yes, to graduate high school and enroll at KU at 14, she did skip a few grades.

Alina said her parents tell her that she was doing well enough in preschool that instead of enrolling in kindergarten she went straight into second grade.

In elementary school, she said, she felt like she wanted more of a challenge and asked to skip all of middle school.

“But my educators didn’t want me to miss out on middle school completely,” she said, so they compromised. Skip seventh grade, attend eighth grade, skip ninth.

When her family moved from Manhattan to Lawrence, she started at Free State High as a 10th-grader and attended the school three years.

Throughout childhood and high school, she played the cello, including as principal cellist with the Topeka Symphony Youth Orchestra. She chose to play with the Topeka group over her high school orchestra because the pieces were more challenging, Alina said.

“I’m mostly self-motivated,” Alina said.

Alina said part of the reason she chose KU was for its individualized attention and the leadership and extracurricular opportunities she would have.

Again, that’s basically just like anyone else — except that she happens to be 16.

“It’s not for everybody — everybody has to have their own path,” Alina said. “I think society’s really great today, in that people really respect intelligence and getting a head start in life.”