The Fast Track to Being a CEO-Engineer

Shubham Banerjee is a typical teenager—playing football, losing himself in video games, doing homework—except when it comes to his career ambitions. The high school senior says he’s known for several years that he wants to found and lead a company, to be a “legendary CEO.” The founding part should come easy: At age 13, Banerjee started a company that makes Braille printers.

Last spring, as he started to consider colleges, he learned of a program at the University of California-Berkeley that would allow him to earn both a bachelor of science in engineering and a bachelor of business in four years. He recently was notified that he’s among the fewer than 3 percent of about 2,500 applicants accepted into the incoming freshman class in Berkeley’s Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology (MET) program.