NEW JERSEY (WABC) — A celebration was held on Wednesday for a 7th grader in Jersey City who was the first runner-up in this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee.<\/p>\n
Ishaan Gupta took the competition down to the wire, correctly spelling 25 words, rattling off countless consonants and vowels in a nail-biting final lightning round of last month’s competition.<\/p>\n
He didn’t win first place, but that didn’t matter.<\/p>\n
He read 600 books by the time he was 10 years old and studied the root meaning of words to spell them correctly.<\/p>\n
Gupta is a celebrity at Middle School Four in Jersey City after finishing as a runner-up.<\/p>\n
He thanked everyone for their support.<\/p>\n
“Whatever I was able to achieve and will do in the future is very much due to all of you, who’ve helped me become who I am today,” Gupta said.<\/p>\n
He was honored by his school and classmates for representing them in a prestigious competition.<\/p>\n
“I definitely had the mindset of a champion, and I almost got there,” Gupta said.<\/p>\n
His parents gushed with pride over their son, whom they had known was special from an early age.<\/p>\n
The father and son teamed up to write a book on climate change, but his mom is the one who kept him focused.<\/p>\n
“One thing you decide and do it, and that’s what I’ve taught him and he has that, but sometimes, you know, as kids, there’s so much distraction. I tell him you set this, you chose this goal, you should be fixed on that goal,” his mother Suruchi Gupta said.<\/p>\n
This was Ishaan’s second Scripps Competition.<\/p>\n
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