The first thing you notice when scheduling time on the calendar of Christian Zhou-Zheng ’26 is how thoroughly booked up it is. His Google calendar, which he refers to as “the source of truth for everything”, has activities scheduled down to the minute. He blocks out time for everything—the big stuff, the mundane, the seemingly obvious. He blocks out dinner. He blocks out his commute. On a recent Saturday, he blocked time for Brunch and daily necessities. A few hours later, he blocked Leisure time. Immediately following that was a block of time titled nap. Blocks called 1HA stood for 1 HOUR BLOCK. 1HHA stood for 1 HALF HOUR BLOCK. His calendar is littered with those, whole chunks of time without further detail that he utilizes to focus time on his various interests and projects. Christian even blocks his sleep schedule. And his schedule does not take a vacation, either. On his recent trip to Japan for Spring Break, he blocked his time out meticulously: 7:30am Get up, breakfast; 8am Get dressed and go; 10PM sleep (tentative); and 4:15pm Store bags at Hakodate Station; 4:45pm Train up to Goryokaku; 5:15-6pm Check out Goryokaku until 6pm closing; and so on. As it turns out, Christian’s packed schedule is to ensure he is methodical and intentional about expanding his horizons, and that starts with not wasting his own time. So he maximizes his routine, learns what he can, and keeps going. Or, as he puts it, “I run a strict schedule.”
“Things like IRT, Quiz Bowl practice, things that are reoccurring are blocked in,” he explains, “and then everything else is segmented into half-hour chunks that I allocate on demand… I think time management is a very important skill to have.”
Christian has been maintaining this strict schedule since sophomore year. “I realized I was going to have to get a lot better at managing my time if I wanted to get nearly as much stuff done as I wanted.”
For Christian, who dedicates much of his free (blocked) time to AI research, the future is calling, and maximizing his time is most definitely warranted. He works for the AI company LM Studio in his (blocked) spare time, has participated in the Ross Mathematics program, and did research in pure mathematics (number theory) where his work was presented by his co-author at the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings; he’s conducted research with RWKV language modeling (an AI project) and published peer-reviewed papers, as well as conducted symbolic music research. He also mentored a group of undergraduate and graduate students—yes, those in college and beyond—during his summer between his junior and senior year of high school (the group later published and won a competition at the 2025 Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval).
When his boss—the founder and CEO of LM Studio—was invited to an OpenAI event in August of 2025, he asked Christian to accompany him. So Christian flew out to San Francisco for a day, where he met Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, and mingled with execs in the AI tech space—a high school kid talking about the future with business people twice his age. No doubt for the many execs who encountered this high school kid comfortably holding court with them, there must have been, from this very future-oriented community, a sense that life does indeed come at you fast.
Christian is always thinking, and his thoughts come and go pretty quickly. When he has his airpods in, he is often listening to music at or above 120 beats per minute, which matches what he calls his “internal metronome”. He thinks fast, and he talks fast, too. “There is something nice about having a beat to align to,” he says, “in terms of how fast I think, right? The way most of my thinking gets done is a sort of internal dialogue, and the speed at which I talk is governed by that.”
For the longest time, Christian has indeed been moving at a heightened speed, one where everyone else around him is simply trying to keep up.
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When it came to thinking big thoughts, Christian got started early. “He knew his 26 letters when he was 7 or 8 months old,” recalls his mom, Mrs. Meilee Zheng. When he was a baby. she bought a pack of foam alphabet letters from Target, and Christian would often come up to her and ask how to pronounce each one. He taught himself to read fluently by 2 1/2, and was writing by the age of 3. “He was very curiosity-driven,” she says.
By age three, he was able to do addition and subtraction, and soon enough he was counting from 10 to 100 by himself, eventually going all the way up to one thousand. When he was in Kindergarten, he wrote a 16-page report on global warming, complete with pictures and descriptions. Soon he was bored to tears at school, and it became a struggle to get him to go at all because he was so frustrated with the lack of challenge. “That’s why we eventually moved him to Pingry,” says Mrs. Zheng.
Christian joined Pingry in Grade 4 and settled in nicely. “That’s when things changed,” his mom recalls. “Pingry has a different curriculum. He was getting enough attention and material for his curiosity and the things he wanted to do.”
Also arriving in Grade 4 was another student seeking a challenge, William Overdeck. Like Christian, he craved a more rigorous educational environment. “It’s funny,” he says. “My initial impression of Christian was that we had both been the respective STEM kids at our previous schools, so we showed up at Pingry and it was kind of a head-to-head of which of us would be the guy in our class.” They quickly developed a friendship twinged with a bit of a rivalry. In Grade 6, they were both doing coding and video game development, each pushing each other further along as they worked. “It’s funny to think back that a lot of that work sprung from things that we were doing together,” Wiliam says. “Some of it was ‘who can make a better game? Who could be a better coder? Who’s better at math, better at science?’ It’s funny looking back on it… It was kind of this ‘iron sharpens iron’ type of thing.”
When they arrived in Middle School, they both skipped a year in their math courses. But at the end of the year, COVID hit, and everything went remote. The challenges students faced academically during this time have been well documented. “In some ways, I fell off the bandwagon of trying to advance through math courses,” shares William. Christian, on the other hand, “ended up skipping another year of math. So he’s now two years ahead of the normal track. And to top it off, he started in his free time taking all the next courses. At that point, I realized, well, really the school just can’t keep up with him. I mean, he’s dictating his own pace and getting it all done before we even hit 9th grade.”
It was during freshman year that Christian decided to take the SATs. Other than the practice tests that came with signing up, he didn’t study. William recalls Christian walking into class one day, talking about a subject many of them had yet to seriously consider. “I remember he said, ‘Oh, I took an SAT recently,’ and we were like, ‘An SAT? You’re a freshman. What are we doing here?’” says William. Christian got a perfect score. “We were all just sort of flabbergasted, for lack of a better word,” says William. Yet he is quick to distinguish that it was clear Christian wasn’t boasting or trying to one-up anyone. “The point with Christian, which really amuses me, is he wasn’t doing this for any competitive sense of like, ‘this 1600 is going to show all the colleges how good I am.’” he says. “That wasn’t what this was. It was really just him doing it to see if he could—and he very much could.”
Despite his initial happiness at the results, Christian soon felt a sense of misery over the whole thing. His mind was already looking ahead: with the SATs out of the way, what now? He began to focus seriously on AI research, and soon started blocking his time to balance his school work with the research and outside work he was doing. Like his internal metronome, he moved at a pace that simply kept going and advancing, never slowing down. From his sophomore to junior year, he began his internship in AI work at LM Studio, and during the winter of his junior year, he began seriously dedicating his time to AI research. This past summer, while continuing his internship, he mentored the undergraduates in research, and this past fall, he presented research at the Conference on Language Modeling, as well as attended the OpenAI industry gathering, and, finally, spoke at Pingry’s Research Week Assembly.
Now, as he prepares for Stanford next fall, he still hasn’t let up. Whether senioritis has set in for him, his grades still have not dipped to a flat A.
“Even though people would sometimes give him flack for that, there was always respect,” observes William. “I would hear people in the hallways be like, ‘Oh, I just can’t with this homework. It’s too difficult. I don’t understand it,’ and then somebody would be like, ‘Yeah, well, you got to go ask Christian.’ It was almost a running joke in that everybody just knew he was that guy. He is the one of one. He is the Christian Zhou-Zheng of our year.”
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This past weekend, Christian missed his senior prom to fly out to Stanford and visit the campus. His mom initially urged him to reconsider. “I wanted him to go,” she says. “I said, ‘Go have some fun! You’re a teenager. You’ve got to have a lot of fun.’” Christian realized his mom was misunderstanding him. “He looked me in my eyes and said, ‘Mom, do you think I’m not having fun?’” Mrs. Zheng paused here, to consider. “That means whatever he’s doing, whether research or other things, that’s fun to him. He’s content. He is happy.”
The subject of happiness is something he has long been contemplating. When he was in Grade 7, his mom took him on a road trip to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Christian, ever thoughtful, was considering the idea of happiness during the car ride. “He said, ‘I realized I always thought if I accomplish this, I’ll be happy, or if I got that, I’ll be happy. But then when I get those things, I realize that so-called happiness only lasted for a little while. It’s the pursuit of it’,” she recalls him saying. “‘I have to be content and enjoy that to be happy’.”
Fresh off his trip from Stanford, Christian is quick to distinguish between happiness, being content, and feeling fulfilled.
“I suppose a useful tl:dr is that happiness is a momentary phenomenon in the present, contentment is a persistent phenomenon relating to the present, and fulfillment is a persistent phenomenon relating to the past.”
As graduation nears, Christian—still thinking and talking at 120 beats per minute—is in pursuit of a future in AI, and the rest of the world is still trying to catch up. In many ways, he is moving through time just like a poem he wrote when he was only five years old:
Time is like a wave.
It flies slow. It flies high.
It flights away.
It never says goodbye.
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To contact the author: Sara Courtney