By Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Mateus de Lima Costa Ribeiro is 19 years old and a few days away from breaking a record: becoming the youngest student to attend the Harvard University Master of Law program, one of the most prestigious in the world.
He will soon move to the United States to begin another premature cycle of studies. This will not be Mateus’ first record.
The student from Brasília passed the law entrance exam at the University of Brasília at the age of fourteen, when he had not yet started high school. At eighteen, he earned OAB (Brazilian Bar Association) accreditation and became the youngest lawyer in the country.
Shortly afterward, he was also the world’s youngest lawyer to make an oral submission before a Supreme Court, speaking to Supreme Court (STF) justices in November of last year.
He tries to include this feat in the Guinness Book of Records. Mateus was also the youngest student to begin a Master’s degree at a Brazilian public university. He is currently attending postgraduate studies at UnB and will now be leaving it for Harvard.
“I wasn’t surprised. People usually start college when they’re older, and I had already completed that phase of school”. He says his friends even joke about the fact. “Today they even sent me a message saying: you’re good at being the youngest, aren’t you?”, he told the story in his home, on Lago Sul, a well-to-do neighborhood in Brasília.
The start of the Harvard approval process was not smooth. Matthew did not pass the English test, the first step to admission. He then had 15 days to prepare for a new language test before the application deadline expired.
“This was a decisive moment because I took a very big hit. I was sure I was going to pass, and I didn’t make it. But when you have self-confidence, you don’t allow a failure to define you,” he said.
Law is a tradition in Mateus’ family. His parents and siblings are all lawyers. One of his uncles is a judge. His career choice turned out to be a natural path, he said.
When he was a kid, he and his siblings used to argue as if they were in a courtroom. “By participating in the discussions, by listening to my parents talk about it, I was naturally directed to this area. And my father liked to take me to court, explain the trials to me, so that was always part of my life, but I fell in love with the law a little on my own too,” he said.