Number of merit semifinalists nearly doubles in UCS

Nearly twice as many Utica Community Schools students have placed among the top one percent of high school students over the past year in the National Merit Scholarship program.

Nineteen UCS students were among the only 16,000 seniors nationally to be National Merit semifinalists.

UCS merit semifinalists are: Marissa Hernandez, Sitara Murali, Stephen Ogden, Aaron Sieracki, and Adam Sieracki of Eisenhower High School; Daniel Mathew, Joseph McMullen, Rebecca Roman, and Katherine Wolff of Henry Ford II High School; Dylan Gaines, Christina Li, Jason Li, John Parke and Akshay Seenivasan of Stevenson High School; Elise Gertsch, Chloe Haskell, Sarika Mahimkar and Alyssa Sanderson, of Utica Academy of International Studies; Cameron Gudobba, of Utica High School.

More than 1.5 million students from the Class of 2016 entered the National Merit Program by taking the 2014 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.

In 2015, ten UCS students were named merit semi-finalists.

To move to the next stage of the program and be considered a finalist, students will submit an application that details a record of consistently high academic performance; recommendations by an official of their high school; earning SAT scores that confirm their PSAT/NMSQT performance; and complete an essay.

Once named a finalist, the students will be eligible for three scholarship opportunities: corporate-sponsored, National Merit Scholarships and college and university.