Los Alamitos Semifinalist Merit Scholars Announced

LOS ALAMITOS, CA — The Los Alamitos Unified School District is proud to announce four National Merit Semifinalists and fourteen National Merit Commended Students for 2017-2018. The Semi-finalists are students who scored in the top 1% of students who took the Preliminary SAT (PSAT) nationwide in fall 2016. Commended students include those who placed among the top 5% of the more than 1.5 million students took this exam.

According to the National Merit Scholarship website, approximately 16,000 of the 50,000 high scoring students were notified in early September that they qualified as Semifinalists. An additional 34,000 students qualified as Commended Students. Recognized students are the highest scoring from each state.

Semifinalists advance to Finalist standing in the competition by meeting high academic standards and all other National Merit Scholarship Competition requirements. These requirements include: plans to enroll as a full-time college student in the fall of 2018, U.S. citizenship or lawful permanent resident status,
endorsement by their high school principal, and a record of consistently high academic performance throughout high school. Although Commended Students will not continue in the 2018 competition for National Merit Scholarship awards, these students are among the elite in their school, county, state, and nation.

Los Alamitos High School National Merit Scholarship Competition Semifinalists:

• Abhishek Kulkarni
• Jina Lee
• Taylor Schissel
• Chelsey Wang

Los Alamitos High School National Merit Scholarship Competition Commended Students:

• Timothy Ahn
• Candler Cusato
• Delaney Falsken
• Nina Ham
• Matthew Ivler
• Sarena Kuhn
• Andy Lam
• Justin Liu
• Keenan Lotts
• Luyan Nguyen
• Lindsay Osaki-Van Loy
• Cole Parsons
• Harrison Russell
• Alec Vida
• Anne Wang
• Robert Yeam

Photos, courtesy Los Alamitos School District