UCI Junior Isn’t Wasting Time--He’s 15

Daniel Vera wasn’t hard to find in the large lecture hall at UC Irvine. He was sitting front row center for Calculus 2-C, “Infinite Series and Three-Dimensional Geometry.” That’s just where you’d expect to find a young man who’s so serious about his studies he writes his notes twice--first on a yellow pad during class then transcribed into a binder at home.

I had never met Daniel, but I knew what he looked like from the publicity photo sent by Orange Coast College, where he completed course work in December with a 4.0 grade-point average. Though he’s already racing ahead as a junior at UC Irvine, Daniel will receive his associate of arts degree with honors from the Costa Mesa community college next week.

Still, good grades alone aren’t enough to attract media attention. Daniel’s buddies during the calculus lecture wondered what I was doing there, squeezed into one of those cramped student seats next to my subject. Lecturer Larry Chrystal also was puzzled about my presence. Later, when he ran into Daniel on campus, the popular professor asked his student why he was being interviewed for the newspaper.

“ ‘Cause,” said Daniel, “I’m 15.”

Now that’s news--even to some of Daniel’s teachers and fellow students. To the young woman who recently gave the whiz kid her telephone number, it’s going to come as a shock.

Daniel looks old for his age. He stands 5 feet and 11 inches and weighs a hair under 200 pounds, a little baby fat being the only giveaway of his age. With his dark hair buzzed around the edges, his emerging sideburns, his blue jeans and his trendy sunglasses worn fashionably backward, he blends in easily with the older college kids.

But as a Latino, he stands out like a statue from his peers. Latino students are burdened with high dropout rates and, since the end of affirmative action, their numbers have slipped at top UC campuses.

So Daniel, son of a Puerto Rican father and Mexican American mother, offers a success story worth considering.

Ironically, Daniel dropped out of school too--in the fourth grade. Actually, he was pulled out by his parents, Joe and Estelle Vera. They believed their child was being held back by what they consider a stifling public school system.

“I was just so bored,” recalls Daniel of his grammar school days in Alta Loma, near Ontario. “Teachers would get mad at me because I would read ahead.”

Some kids in his class couldn’t add or subtract, his parents say. Others were unruly. The teacher spent more time on policing than teaching.

Letting Daniel skip to the sixth grade was no solution. A few students there were more sexually advanced and beginning to experiment with drugs. No place for a little kid, his parents said they were warned by the principal.

The Veras, who now live in Lake Forest, decided to teach their son at home. When he got too smart for them, they hired UC Irvine graduate students as tutors. One of them was Rachel Lehman, now Daniel’s professor.

“He’s definitely not some Einstein genius,” Lehman said. “He just gets it the first time. He doesn’t need to hear things over and over, and he doesn’t waste time.”

Daniel has no secondary diploma. He went to high school only to take his SAT, the college entrance exams.

His scores? That’s confidential, say his parents. No matter how much I badgered them over a late lunch Wednesday across from the UC Irvine campus, they wouldn’t even tell me how Daniel did on the math part.

“We’ve never gone by the scores, of California or of any institution or any district,” said his mother defiantly. “We never wanted Daniel to be a guinea pig. This is a child, a hard-working child. And the numbers don’t mean anything.”

Daniel didn’t strike me as a geek or a strange child genius. He’s easygoing, with a ready smile. He studies martial arts, likes girls and plays guitar because “you know, like, you can serenade ‘em.”

He doesn’t watch much television, but likes rock, jazz and classical music, no rap or country. He’s also an aspiring screenwriter, with an idea for a science-fiction thriller based on “good science” in the sense that “it could literally happen.”

But the plot is top secret too.

Daniel has always loved to read. His mom says she read out loud to her son in the womb. But the boy-to-be wasn’t being nurtured on nursery rhymes. He spent his gestation chewing on “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill.

At six months, Daniel would crawl to fetch the how-to book with the green cover and bring it to his mother. Coincidence? Estelle considers it a sign that her son was special.

“I’m nothing special, I’m really not,” Daniel counters. “I’m no genius, and pardon me for saying this, but my parents are not special either. They’re average hard-working Americans. But I owe them all the credit.”

The Veras laughed at their son’s candid parental assessment.

Joe Vera, 53, a mortgage broker specializing in distressed real estate, is a burly man with a booming voice. His grandfather was a Puerto Rican farm worker, his father a quiet man who emigrated to New York in 1937 and was wounded during World War II. Joe Jr. served in the Navy in the late 1960s, majored in chemistry at UC San Diego but never completed his bachelor’s degree. He later worked as a jazz pianist.

The former Estelle Arrieta was born in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, daughter of a heart surgeon father and a mother from a well-heeled family of generals and large land holders. Her grandfather, she says, fought against Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution.

Estelle, 49, was raised in Pico Rivera and graduated with a business degree from Rio Hondo College in Whittier. She was working as the manager of a title company in south Orange County when she met Joe, who would become her second husband. They were both raised as Catholics but now attend Calvary Chapel. Both have adult children from previous marriages.

Daniel, however, is Joe’s only son.

Since he works from home, Joe has been actively involved with his son, even taking him on business trips. From the start, he insisted that Estelle stay home to be a full-time mom. The Veras never left their son with a baby-sitter and Estelle still picks up Daniel at UC Irvine after class.

Joe is a self-confessed dictator as a father: “When I give an order, there’s no negotiating and I don’t justify myself.” But he says he and his wife never spanked Daniel.

“The only punishment was yelling, and it was effective,” confirmed the teenager as he finished his Cajun pasta.

In the fall of 1999, Daniel carried so many courses simultaneously at UC Irvine and Orange Coast that he averaged just three to four hours of sleep a night. I asked if his parents pressured him to excel.

“No,” he said. “They never, ever pushed me. I always pushed myself.”

His parents won’t allow him to repeat that killer schedule.

“But you’ve got to know Daniel to be able to understand this,” Estelle says. “He wants to know so much so soon that he pushes himself so much. It’s like there’s not enough time in the day.”

Joe has only one piece of advice for other parents:

“The responsibility for the child’s education belongs to the parents, not the government. You don’t want Hillary or the village anywhere near your child.”

Estelle slaps her husband’s arm, playfully reprimanding him for his political bluntness. Not that she disagrees with her husband’s conservative views.

“She’s just a lot nicer than my father,” offers Daniel, who orders a hot brownie with whipped cream, strawberries and three scoops of ice cream for desert, which we help him eat. “There you have the balance of forces that made me an adjusted child--the fist and the open hand, the nurturing mother and the hard father.”

Daniel says his parents have a running disagreement about the reasons for his exceptional success. It’s the old nature/nurture debate: Mom believes her boy was born bright; dad thinks he was raised to excel.

“We didn’t’ do it,” says mom. “We just nurtured him.”

“Yeah, we did it,” says dad with a smug smile.

But Daniel got the last word.

“I did it,” he said.

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Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or agustin.gurza@latimes.com.