North Central senior accepted to every Ivy League college

On his first day of school in the second grade at Nora Elementary, Stefan Stoykov sat in the corner of the classroom, feeling scared as he watched other students walk into the room.

When they came up and spoke to him, he tried to make some sense of what they were saying. But he didn't understand a word of English, so all he could do was bob his head.

Ten years later, Stoykov is graduating as the valedictorian of North Central High School, with a perfect SAT score that helped him win acceptances to all eight Ivy League schools — plus every one of the 10 other colleges to which he applied.

"I hoped to get into one of them," he said. "Now I have the chance to study at all of them."

Stoykov's family won a green card lottery to move to the United States from Bulgaria when he was 8. The family of four had been living in a small one-bedroom apartment in Bulgaria, where his mother worked at a mine loading iron ore into carts and his father was a military chef.

They knew no English, Stoykov said, but they decided to take a chance on coming to America.

His family moved in with his aunt and uncle in Indianapolis, crowding six people into a two-bedroom apartment until his parents could save up enough to rent their own place.

Within months, however, his parents divorced. His father took a job as a truck driver, and "I didn't keep up with him much after that," Stoykov said.

His mother had found work as a housekeeper. She moved Stoykov and his younger brother around often to different apartments in Washington Township whenever the rent would go up, constantly in search of a cheap place to live, Stoykov said.

At school, Stoykov studied English as a second language, bringing home books to study more at night on his own.

He remembered the frustrating assignments he would get in second grade: Describe what you did over the weekend. He sat in class with a Bulgarian-to-English dictionary, translating each word but knowing what he wrote still wouldn't make sense.

But his teacher, Ellen Sayles, noticed that although Stoykov couldn't speak a word of English, "What he did have were bright eyes and an inquisitive attitude that never left him and clearly helped him get to where he is today," she said in a statement.

By the end of second grade, Stoykov had learned a lot of English words. By the end of third grade, he could write full sentences — though looking back, he said, they weren't always grammatically correct, and "I have no idea what I sounded like talking to people back then."

But third grade was also when he had a moment that would motivate his academic success.

His class took timed math tests: 100 problems in five minutes.

When the time was up, Stoykov had always finished the most problems. None of the other students was getting perfect scores. Teachers said to him: "Congratulations. Look at what you could do!"

"I realized," Stoykov said, "if I apply myself, I could really do well."

His mom always told him that one reason they moved to the U.S. was so he could have better educational opportunities, and he saw how hard she worked to make that happen.

"The sacrifices my family made to move here — I didn't want it to be wasted by me not taking advantage of all the opportunities I had," he said.

By fifth grade, he could speak and understand English just as well as the other children around him.

Since his mother didn't speak English, he went with her whenever she needed him to translate. She picked up a little bit of English at work, and he would teach her the new words he learned in school.

By high school, Stoykov was taking the toughest classes at the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate levels.

He revived the dormant cycling club, won a National Merit Scholarship, coordinated the student council's Spirit Week.

He presented an award-winning history project in Washington, D.C., on the socioeconomic factors that fueled opposition to the civil rights movement. He captained the Science Olympiad team and took home a medal at the state competition. He tutored students after school, helping in particular the Burmese students who face the same language barrier that he had to hurdle.

He joined the stock market club and invited financial consultants to speak at the school. He likes predicting trends in stock values but sticks to virtual simulations — if he invested in stocks for real, he said, he would need about $1,000, and "my mom wouldn't let me risk that kind of money, since it's a lot."

He wrote a research paper on whether the policies of Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov hurt or helped the country, in part to better understand his own parents' struggles in his home country. Stoykov concluded in his paper that the ruler maintained economic stability in Bulgaria at the expense of human rights.

He studied for the SAT by borrowing a test guide from the school library. He didn't want to write in the book, so he wrote out each problem on scrap paper. He took plenty of practice tests, usually missing questions in the reading section.

But when he got his SAT scores back last year, there it was: a perfect 2400. He had aced all three sections of reading, writing and math.

"As a student, he's meticulous," said William Gulde, North Central's IB diploma coordinator and a history teacher.

Stoykov, he said, is the kind of student who meets with the teacher ahead of time to discuss assignments, who turns in drafts of papers before they're due.

"He sometimes worries he's not working hard enough," Gulde said. "He doesn't realize he's so far ahead of the curve."

Even when it came to looking at colleges, Gulde said Stoykov worried: "Do I have what it takes to get into these schools?"

Eighteen big envelopes from colleges across the country say yes.

Over the past week, Stoykov has been accepted to every Ivy League college: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and Dartmouth.

But 10 other colleges want him, too: Stanford, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, Washington University in St. Louis, Williams College, Amherst College, Pomona College, Claremont McKenna College, Duke University and the University of Notre Dame.

Stoykov went 18 for 18 on college acceptances — another perfect score.

"His friends brought him to me," Gulde said. "He had a big smile on his face."

Tell Mr. Gulde your news, Stoykov's friends prodded him.

Reports this year indicate that only two other teens across the country — one in New York and one in Minnesota — have been accepted to all eight Ivy League schools.

Now comes the hard part: deciding where to go. Harvard and others offered Stoykov full scholarships. Several schools gave him stipends to visit this month.

His mom was so proud, he said, and told him, "I knew this would happen one day, all your hard work would pay off."

"I admire his tenacity," Dida Stoykova texted in Bulgarian about her son Wednesday, "and he never gives up in the face of difficulty."

"My mom doesn't really know anything about the SAT. She doesn't really know anything about colleges," Stoykov said. She can't come with him on his college visits, he said, but "she knows I'll make the most of where I go."

It was his mother's inspiration that Stoykov wrote about in his college essays. He knows he is lucky, and he knows he has her to thank. He thinks about how he and his younger brother didn't get to spend a lot of time with her when they were growing up, because she was working so hard to support them.

He wants to pay her back somehow, so these days, when he has free time, he goes with her to help clean — so that a housekeeping job that may take her four hours alone might take only two hours together.

Call Star reporter Stephanie Wang at (317) 444-6184. Follow her on Twitter: @stephaniewang.