Ten UCS seniors named among top high school students in nation

Ten UCS students are among 15,000 students nationally to be named as semifinalists in the National Merit Scholarship program.

Merit semifinalists represent the top one percent of all U.S. high school students taking the Preliminary SAT.

UCS merit semifinalists are: Amil Mahida and Dylan Plummer of Eisenhower High School; Jacob Burns, Saumeel Desai, James Montgomery, Katelyn Schram and Nicholas Weingartz of Stevenson High School; Marisa Hocking of the Utica Academy for International Studies and Trevor Macks and Alexander Will of Utica High School.

Burns, Desai, Mahida, Macks, Montgomery, Plummer, Schram and Weingartz also attend the Utica Center for Mathematics, Science and Technology.

More than 1.5 million students of the Class of 2014 entered the National Merit Program by taking the 2012 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.

To be selected as a semifinalist, students fulfilled the requirements to enter the next round of the scholarship program which included having a record of consistently high academic performance, being endorsed and recommended by an official of their high school, earning SAT scores that confirm their PSAT/NMSQT performance and writing an essay.