Stanford University awards Turkish student with $500,000 scholarship

Beyazıt Şenbük - KONYA

Stanford University has offered an 18-year-old Turkish student a scholarship of approximately 10 million Turkish Liras ($500,000).

Efe Zaladin, who graduated from a private high school in the Central Anatolian province of Konya last year, discovered his interest in science as a child.

In high school, Zaladin became a finalist in the A Beamline for Schools, an international physics competition organized annually by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

As the recipient of a massive scholarship, Zaladin attributed his success to never taking extra-curriculum courses for the national university exams and constantly trying to improve himself with new projects.

“Mostly because I have different interests than my peers, I have difficulty getting along with people. I am a person who lives in his own world. As I always sat in the back row, my teachers used to think I was not interested in the class. But, in fact, I was already at a good level in my classes. I graduated from high school with a 3.98 GPA out of 4,” Zaladin explained.

Stating that when his interests started to exceed the curriculum in high school, Zaladin said he began to visit and observe academic projects at Selçuk University, and those professors contributed to his education more than any of his high school teachers.

Zaladin has so far developed a system that establishes a connection between computers without the internet and has also worked on software that solves mathematical equations for dangerous points in 3D space. However, he stated that his main goal is to establish a start-up.

Noting that the requirements to get into a good university in Türkiye are different from those in the U.S., Zaladin said that he did not take the university exams in Türkiye as he thought he probably would not have succeeded.