2018 National Merit Scholarship Awarded To Norwich Student

NORWICH, CT — Lyme-Old Lyme High School senior Sarah Grace Kwon, a Norwich resident, was named one of approximately 3,500 National Merit Scholarship winners for 2018, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) announced this week.

Kwon, whose probable career field is public policy, was given the following award:

NATIONAL MERIT UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP
The University of Chicago is small, private, coeducational, and residential; it has an international reputation for distinction. The college (3,425 undergraduate students) offers liberal arts training in over 60 areas; 3,100 students are enrolled in 4 graduate divisions and about 3,000 in 7 graduate professional schools. Since 1892, Chicago has drawn gifted students from around the world to its beautiful 165-acre campus and has offered unexcelled teaching and extensive library and research facilities.

The National Merit Scholarships are financed by U.S. colleges and universities, and officials from each sponsor college select their scholarship winners from among the Finalists in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Program who plan to attend their institution.

"These awards provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship," states NMSC. "An additional group of Scholars will be announced in July, bringing the total number of college-sponsored Merit Scholarship recipients in the 2018 competition to about 4,000."

For 2018, 178 higher education institutions are underwriting Merit Scholarship awards through the National Merit Scholarship Program. Those sponsor colleges and universities include 100 private and 78 public institutions located in 44 states and the District of Columbia, according to NMSC.

The college-sponsored Merit Scholarship winners are a part of the distinguished group of about 7,500 high school seniors who will receive National Merit Scholarships for college undergraduate study worth a total of more than $31 million. Earlier this spring, NMSC announced winners of corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards and National Merit $2500 Scholarships.

From the National Merit Scholarship Corporation's release:

2018 National Merit Scholarship Competition
Over 1.6 million juniors in more than 22,000 high schools entered the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Program when they took the 2016 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. Last fall, approximately 16,000 Semifinalists were named on a state-representational basis in numbers proportional to each state’s percentage of the national total of graduating high school seniors. Semifinalists were the highest-scoring program entrants in each state and represented less than one percent of the nation’s seniors.

To compete for Merit Scholarship awards, Semifinalists first had to advance to the Finalist level of the competition by fulfilling additional requirements. Each Semifinalist was asked to submit a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay and providing information about extracurricular activities, awards, and leadership positions. Semifinalists also had to have an outstanding academic record, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, and earn SAT® scores that confirmed the qualifying test performance. From the Semifinalist group, some 15,000 met requirements for Finalist standing, and about half of the Finalists will be Merit Scholarship winners in 2018.

NMSC, a not-for-profit corporation that operates without government assistance, was established in 1955 to conduct the National Merit Scholarship Program. The majority of National Merit Scholarships provided each year are made possible by the support of approximately 410 independent corporate and college sponsors. These sponsors join NMSC in its efforts to enhance educational opportunities for America’s scholastically talented youth and to encourage the pursuit of academic excellence.

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