National Merit Semifinalists announced nationwide

Forty Blazers were named as National Merit Semifinalists were released on Sept. 14. Although the Blair semifinalists were notified sometime in the past several days, they were urged to keep their competition status confidential until the nationwide announcement.

The National Merit Scholarship Competition uses the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) that students take in fall of their junior year as the qualifying test for the competition. About 16,000 students nationwide are named as semifinalists in September of their senior year. In February, about 15,000 of those are named as finalists and around 8,200 of those are offered scholarships during March and June of their senior year.

Semifinalist status is based entirely on performance on the PSAT/NMSQT as compared to a scoring index, which varies from state to state. The selection of finalists, however, is based on a number of other factors, including: recommendation letters, grades and extra-curricular activities.

Semifinalists and finalists are selected from the top 50,000 highest scorers on the test nationwide. The 34,000 high scorers who do not qualify for semifinalist status are not permitted to advance in the scholarship competition, and are sent letters of commendation. The Class of 2005 had 56 Semifinalists, 16 more than the Class of 2006.

The National Merit Semifinalists at Blair from 2006 are:

Elizabeth Albert
Alexander Alm
Michael Arbit
Jacob Asbell
Rachel Bell
Jahnavi Bhaskar
Kiran Bhat
Lu Chen
Abhishek Dhar
Gregory Donaldson
Katrina Emery
Frederick Esch
Rose Fienberg
Daniel Gillen
Alexander Gold
Jordan Goldstein
Jeremy Goodman
Robert Hendryx
Gregory Howard
Ravi Joseph
Mitchell Katz
John Kim
Rachel Kirsch
Erik Li
Yueyang Li
Joseph Lorenz
Max Morawski
Sean O'Brien
Margot Pass
Samir Paul
John Silberholz
Will Tao
Andreas Voellmer
Eddie Wang
David White
Avi Wolfman-Arent
Sarah Wolk
Nina Yang
Yuan Zhang
Yuning Zhang