Fund the Future: Juneau seventh-grader yearns to learn

This month's Fund the Future winner is a Juneau seventh-grader who doesn't wait for a lesson plan to teach him about the world.

No one taught Quinn White how to ride a unicycle; he learns things on his own.

"It took me about two weeks to get it down," he said.

Once he masters the basics, he starts looking for a new challenge.

"I think it's something I was raised with, but I think it's also just that I want to have a good life for myself and I want to have a good future so I have to try my best," he said.

"He's always been super inquisitive; he always takes things apart. We'll come down here to the beach and he'll dig and explore," his mother, Liz White, said. "He can't leave things be. He has to know how they work and figure out what they do."

Take for example the state museum. Last year Quinn went on a class field trip and saw the new Science on a Sphere exhibit.

It captivated him and Quinn asked if he could volunteer as a tour guide.

"At first they'd walk in and, 'Oh, isn't this cute,' and then about five minutes later they're going, 'Oh, I have a question,'" Bob Banghart with the Alaska State Museum said.

Quinn eventually wrote a list of programs for the globe that demonstrate climate change.

"We were learning from him because he's born digital; he is from that digital age," Banghart said.

This summer, Quinn plans to volunteer for the Juneau Convention and Visitors Bureau, showing tourists around the city he grew up in.

He'll tell you he enjoys sharing his expertise -- but in all truthfulness, he needs those volunteer hours to get into a prestigious boarding school on the East Coast.

"They have a really good teaching method called the Harkness Method, which is more of a discussion instead of a lecture," Quinn said.

"It's a tough situation, because you have kids because you want to experience raising them and to send them off to school, it's tough but it would be such a wonderful experience for him," his father, Jeff White, said.

Quinn has big plans for the future.

"I want to be some sort of scientist. I want to go to a really good science college like MIT or Stanford," he said.

Contact Ted Land at tland@ktuu.com