Meet the top grade-getter in Kurdistan schools

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The top-scoring twelfth-grade student in the Kurdistan Region for the school year of 2017-18 spoke to Kurdistan 24 on Thursday. Payam Naiyf, a 19 year-old Erbil resident, shared her thoughts on studying, her daily routines, and plans for her future.

Every year, students in Iraq end their final year of secondary school with the most intense exams they have yet encountered. The experience is almost always a stressful one, as the results can have a deep impact on their placement in higher education, or whether they continue schooling at all.

Naiyf was, just last month, one of these students. Through tireless work and excellent family support, she finished her exams gracefully, tying with one other student at the top of her class across the whole of the Kurdistan Region.

The other over-achiever is named Basta Yasin and lives in Sulaimani Province.

Yasin and Naiyf shared the average mark of 99.4 percent, down from the usual 100 percent students are sometimes able to score, a sign of the increased difficulty of this year's exams.

“I study seven hours a day in my room,” she said, showing her room and the desk at which she pours through assignments with a special schedule she has devised. Aside from her normal coursework, she also reads books "on psychology and medicine in the English and Turkish languages.”

Naiyf, since first grade, has been at the top of her class with marks ranging only from 98 to 100 percent.

For her performance in previous years, she was accepted to a local private school where she strengthened her language skills and took up a science major.

On the role of a student's environment in their success, she said, “I think that family and teachers are important. A student’s hard work, however, is of much greater importance."

Naiyf is from a middle-class family, her parents both graduates from the College for Clinical Studies.

Her father has always been a strong supporter of his children and expressed pride at his daughter's success.

“Providing the bare necessities is not the essential condition [to raise children]. Parents have to be able to provide psychological support to their children and cultivate their progress.”

Naiyf said her plans for the future were to further her knowledge in psychology and get a degree in the mental health profession.

Due to the rarity of such studies in the Kurdistan Region specifically, and the Middle-East in general, she sees it as a worthy path to follow.

Editing by John J. Catherine