Mei-Lin Cheng, the sole creator of the single biggest advancement in blocking spam, malware and ransomware. She created a simple plug-in that works in phones, laptops and PC to block all malicious code before they can execute it. That was merely a project she created for her senior science fair project.

The algorithm she created was both simple and brutally efficient. Did I mention she was a multi-millionaire before she graduated high school, which she did early. She recently turned 18 years old, but she was a petite Asian girl with a more youthful appearance. People mistook her father for her grandfather on more than one occasion.

She sold her code to OzWare Corporation for a hefty sum. Mr. Stephan Gatz himself, the CEO of OzWare, personally signed the check and handed it to her when he purchased the rights to her algorithm. She handed him a thumb drive and a printed version of the code in a three-ring binder with only 11 pages in it. The code was elegant and compact.

Stephan tried to low-ball her on the price. Mei-Lin, though, was a very savvy negotiator, something she learned from her uncle while working for him during the summers. He taught her to never take the first offer without moving the needle in your favor. There was always room for negotiation, especially when the other person is going to you.

The rumor was he asked her not to take over his company for a few more years. Everyone present assumed it was a joke. Neither Mei-Lin nor Stephan were laughing. Mei-Lin was well on her way to being the next Stephan Gatz straight out of high school.

Mei-Lin could have easily gone to any university in the world. Most were offering her full scholarships for the prestige of having her listed as a student. She set her heart on only one school though, MIT. It solved a problem: getting away from her parents. They were loving but overbearing. What better way than to move to the far side of the country.

She didn’t like to fly, but needed to cross the entire United States to reach MIT. The sensible thing to do was rent a car. Instead, she bought her parents an RV and they traveled from San Francisco, California to Cambridge, Massachusetts via the scenic route. She wanted to see Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon and Mammoth Cave on her way east. Her parents, proud Chinese-Americans, were more than happy to indulge their gifted daughter.

It took the Cheng family two whole weeks to trek across the United States and visit the sites Mei-Lin had on her bucket list. They arrived two days before the dorms opened. This gave the family plenty of time to learn their way around the city.

Once the campus housing opened, Mei-Lin’s mother and father helped her move her belongings into the door room. MIT did a mandatory first-year on-campus housing rule in place. The room wasn’t terrible. She was ecstatic to be away from home and her parents for the first time in her life. She kissed them goodbye and sent them home in the RV.

Her first year of classes were easy enough. She was a genius. Mei-Lin tested out of basic hours and taken dual credit classes to get a lot of the general educational classes out of the way. She wanted to take more advanced classes, but those were full of upper-level students. She, too, would have to pay her dues and cover the basics if she were to achieve her goals.

The first year seemed to last more than two semesters of nine months. She felt she was wasting her time in some classes, but she got through it. When registration for her sophomore year opened, she wrote a script to register 10 minutes before the system allowed it, just in case the clocks were off on the system. She knew from working with her uncle how sloppy some technicians could be with the basic stuff.

The next morning she rose at 5:00 AM to see what her code won her. From the logs she was reading, the first successful attempt to register was 12:00:12 AM, so someone had the clocks synched. Her successful schedule landed four of the five classes she desired with one of her alternates. Not bad. She would improve the code for next semester.

She could have carried more than 15 hours, but she wanted to have a little fun next year now that she was out from under the oppressive environment that was her home life. Her parents meant well, but they were constantly pushing her to achieve more. As Asian-Americans, they wanted their child to live the American dream. Already a millionaire at 18 wasn’t good enough for them?

Mei-Lin’s parents wanted to come pick her up in the RV, but she instead opted to stay in the Cambridge area for the summer and intern with a local company that her uncle helped her find. Uncle Woo had connections all over the country. He was the one that helped her get her first job while in high school.

While most of her contemporaries were flipping burgers and asking if you wanted fries with that, she was getting her A+ certification and doing customer support for her uncle’s networking and small systems business. The following year she passed the test for her CCNP and her uncle paid her the same as any other employee.

With her resume, she quickly found an internship with a security company in the area. Though Mei-Lin didn’t need the money, she wanted to keep her skills current and expanding. Her goals and dreams seemed to converge quickly.

There was only one slight problem with her plan. She needed to find off-campus housing for the summer, but she was shy about living alone. As a diminutive girl, she always feared being alone in a place.

Her father would never condone her living off-campus and straying from the regimented life he had enforced while she was under his roof. Her mother, however, was a kindred spirit. When Mei-Lin confided in her mother, she wanted to rent a house or an apartment, her mother told her about an old college friend of hers that had a daughter that was attending MIT. She gave Mei-Lin the friend’s daughter’s info and suggested she see if they could be roommates.