Dozens Of Bergen County Academies Students Named National Merit Semifinalists

BERGEN COUNTY, NJ — Dozens of students from Bergen County Academies, Bergen County Technical High School and Bergen Catholic high schools were named semifinalists in the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Program.

Bergen County Academies

Sharon Ahn, Amulya Balakrishnan, Alexander Blumenfield, Olivia Cecoltan, Madeleine M. Chang, Minsung Cho, Sarah Chowdhury, Katherine Dickey, Jason D'Souza, Lily Ge, Philip Han, Hiroki Hoshida, Isabella Impalli, Justin Jung, Nicholas Kassoy, Akanksha Kataria, Katie Katz, Evan Lee, Gene Lee, Iris Lee, Jordan Lee, Michelle Lee, Tara Maier, Julia Parsley, Stephanie Shue, Avi Slavin, Sophia Spiegel, Maansi Srivastava, Kenneth Stier, Simona Vigodner, Clairisse Whang, Brandon Wong, Arthur Yan, Rurie Yi, Emily Yu, Shannon Zhang, Laura Zhou and Michael Zhou.

Bergen County Technical High School

Christina Chen, Casey Ferrante, Jason Gong, Rachel Lu and David Yu.

Bergen Catholic High School

Noah Park

About 1.6 million juniors in more than 22,000 high schools entered the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2016 PSAT.

All semifinalists are eligible to receive 7,500 National Merit Scholarships worth $33 million.

The nationwide pool of semifinalists represents less than 1 percent of high school seniors.

A semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, write an essay and earn SAT scores that confirm their earlier performance on the PSAT.

From the approximately 16,000 semifinalists, about 15,000 are expected to be named finalists. Three types of scholarship awards will be offered next year: National Merit $2,500 scholarships, corporate-sponsored scholarships and college-sponsored scholarships.

Scholarship winners will be announced in spring 2018.

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