Turkish kid accepted to school for gifted students in US

ISTANBUL

A Turkish student has been accepted to the Edison Regional Gifted Center, a school for gifted students in the U.S., with a full scholarship, for the first time in history.

In the school’s admissions exam, from which only 28 successful students were accepted, 3,500 students competed, while five-year-old Turkish child Eren Akdoğan came first with an IQ of 153.

Eren, a child of a couple working in cloud computing and artificial intelligence at IBM, lives with his family in Chicago, according to Sözcü daily.

Eren was guided by his teachers at nursery to take the Regional Gifted Centers Admissions Testing, an examination to identify gifted children once a year in the U.S.

Erman Akdoğan, Eren’s father, said that his child was born in the U.S., but spent between the ages of two and four and a half in Turkey.

“His mother tongue is not English, and he had no preparations. We were not very hopeful. Families were sending their children to courses at the age of two for this exam,” he said.

“Everyone was very surprised when Eren broke a record and got the first place,” he added.

Akdoğan said that Eren’s superhero was not Superman, but Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey, and that he wants to be a robot engineer in the future.