Sitting down for a personal meeting with Bill Gates last fortnight, 10-year-old Arfa Karim Randhawa asked the Microsoft founder why the company does not hire people her age. Under the circumstances, the question was not so unreasonable. Arfa, a promising software programmer from Faisalabad, Pakistan, is believed to be the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in the world. Arfa received the certification when she was still 9. It began at age 5, when she walked by a computer lab at her school and started wondering about those strange “boxes,” the computers and monitors. She persuaded her father to buy a computer, and demonstrated unexpected aptitude, using Microsoft PowerPoint and other programs. Encouraged by what she was doing, her father took her to Applied Technologies, or APTECH, an advanced computer institute nearby. “I saw her making presentations,” said her father, Amjad Karim, who serves with a U.N. peacekeeping force in Africa She has created basic Windows applications, such as a calculator and a sorting program, primarily in the C# programming language. The certification she received was as a Microsoft Certified Application Developer.