At some point within the next two or three years, respectively, brothers Brandon and Ryan Nguyen will graduate from a four-year college.

Shortly thereafter they’ll graduate from high school.

Thanks to Running Start, a statewide program that allows qualified high school students to take classes at a University of Hawaii system school for credits that apply to both high school and college graduation requirements, the precocious pair have been able to upend and accelerate traditional expectations of academic progress while at the same time ensuring that their intellectual abilities are sufficiently challenged and their perspective of what is possible for their futures greatly broadened.

While most of the participants are high school juniors and seniors, Brandon was a 12-year-old freshman at Kaiser High School when he started taking classes at Kapiolani Community College two years ago. Ryan was still an eighth-grader at Niu Valley Middle School when he followed Brandon to KCC last year.

To be sure, the brothers’ academic achievements represent above-average intelligence flowering through hard work and dedication. Yet they also have much to do with the boys recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities made possible by their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles.

Both sides of their family immigrated to the United States from Vietnam to escape deprivations and persecution suffered in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Their father, Terry, was 7 years old when he and his family fled Vietnam aboard an overcrowded boat headed for Thailand. Their mother, Lillian, left the country later as a teenager, having secured sponsorship from relatives who had left earlier and had worked tirelessly to secure a foothold in their adopted home.

Like others of their generation of immigrants, Terry, a dentist, and Lillian, a former pharmacist, made good on the opportunities afforded them in the United States and have been able to provide their children — Brandon, Ryan, plus 4-year-old Alex and 2-year-old Alan — a level of comfort and freedom that seemed impossible back in Vietnam. But that led to concerns of a different sort.

“If you’re not cold, you won’t seek warmth,” Terry said. “If you’re not hungry, you won’t seek food. Brandon and Ryan’s generation has everything they want, so what’s going to motivate them to keep moving forward? Fortunately, they both appreciate what they have.”

In fact, the brothers are driven by different appetites. Free of material want, they have from an early age delighted in feeding their intellectual curiosity and developing their own ethical perspectives.

Both were early and voracious readers who skipped grades early on, with Ryan at one point sitting in the same second-grade class as his older brother.

While both are unfailingly polite, confident and articulate, Brandon admits to being more outgoing.

“I’m more assertive, a little more hyper,” he says. “I’m stubborn, and I try to get through things quicker — all the characteristics of the perfect annoying younger brother, even though I’m older.”

Ryan tends to be quieter in public, amiably ceding the spotlight when his brother is around. And while Brandon is wont to get through tasks quickly and move on to the next thing, Ryan is an unapologetic perfectionist who will agonize over an assignment before turning it in.

The family credits the boys’ experiences with the International Science and Engineering Fair as key in accelerating their academic development. Brandon first participated when he was in the seventh grade, and made connections that eventually led to him finding a professional mentor in chemistry and being referred to testing that ultimately led to his participation in the Running Start program.

Conceiving, researching and preparing each year’s projects had intrinsic value for both brothers, but both also insist that perhaps the greatest takeaways from the annual competitions were the opportunities to present before professionals, interact with judges and eventually receive outside instruction and mentorship from higher-level students and professors.

“When we both started attending ISEF, we both got to talk with undergraduate students, upper-level high school students, even doctors,” Ryan said. “We needed mentors, and their labs would be full of these folks. So we’d go upstairs and talk to doctors and then go downstairs and talk to undergraduates, and that sort of interaction became normal.”

Such experience would prove invaluable as the brothers began taking college courses side by side with traditional freshmen several years their senior and nontraditional students old enough to be their parents or grandparents. So far, both Brandon and Ryan have adjusted well to college while keeping a toe or two in high school. They stay in contact with their old friends while finding ways to connect with their college peers.

Where Brandon and Ryan go from here is largely up to them, Terry said. He, his wife and their forebears have sacrificed much to secure them the privilege of determining their own paths. He knows they make the most of it.

“They’re fearless,” he said.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.