by Caitlin Pham and Elaine Vo, staff writers
This year’s semifinalists for the National Merit Scholarship Program, are seniors Brian Wang, Christian Warloe, Brandon Vu, Christine Nguyen, and Amy Hoang.
The National Merit Scholarship program gives students the opportunity to compete for academic recognitions and scholarships.
If students choose to take the the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, or more commonly known as, the Pre SAT, their junior year, they are entered into the race for the National Merit Scholarship. 50,000 students are then deemed eligible to receive the National Merit Scholarship recognitions.
16,000 out of the 50,000 eligible students are chosen and notified that they have made it into the semifinalist stage in fall of their senior year. Semifinalists include all the students that have scored the highest points in their state. For California, the cutoff score this year was 222 out of 240 points possible on the PSAT.
From there, the applicants are narrowed down to 8,000 students who will receive the prestigious award.
“Everyone was required to take the PSAT as a junior and then I guess we were automatically entered and then last week I think I got summoned to the Career center and Ms. Wakeman told me that I’ve been entered as a semi-finalist so I have to apply to be a finalist,” Christine Nguyen said.
To qualify as a finalist, the student has to re-apply, and receive a letter from their college counselor because there are a limited amount of scholarships
All five semifinalists were in the same class at Elite’s SAT prep class and studied for the entire duration of their summer.
The semifinalists were not expecting to be entered in this esteemed competition.
Brian Wang said, “Was I expecting the nomination? Well, I partially expected it because I got 2290 but then it was kind of borderline because I thought only 2300 made it.”
