16 South Brunswick Teens Selected As Nat'l Merit Semi-Finalists

SOUTH BRUNSWICK, NJ — An outstanding sixteen students at South Brunswick High School were chosen as semi-finalists for the extremely competitive 2020 National Merit Scholarship Program.

The semi-finalists were announced Wednesday, Sept. 11.

How are students chosen as National Merit semi-finalists? Students do not actually apply in this first round. All juniors are automatically enrolled when they take the PSATs; a score above 212 earns them National Merit "commended" recognition. That is about 50,000 of the highest-scoring PSAT students in the nation. From there, the semi-finalists are further winnowed down by state, and the final number per state is in proportion to a state's population (i.e., New Jersey will have more National Merit semi-finalists than North Dakota.)

There are about 16,000 semi-finalists nationwide, representing less than 1 percent of all high-school seniors in the U.S. To give you an idea of just how competitive selection is, many New Jersey high schools, both public and private, had no students selected.

The South Brunswick seniors who qualified are:

• Alphons, Malaika G.
• Ansari, Kashif
• Bhalla, Rahul
• Fu, Evelyn L.
• Hang, Emily V.
• Kunamneni, Sruthi R.
• Laud, Mihir P.
• Li, Allison W.
• Narahari, Srihith R.
• Parthasarathy, Praveen S.
• Peddinti, Rajat V.
• Seshadri, Sudarshan
• Shah, Isha
• Taneja, Samarth
• Vedula, Sreekar
• Yin, Franlin

Nine students qualified from East Brunswick High School, three from North Brunswick High School, 18 from Princeton High School and thirteen from West Windsor-Plainsboro South. Four students qualified from the Middlesex County Academy for Science, Mathematics and Engineering, located in Edison.

From here, students must now apply to become a finalist. The student and their high school must submit a detailed application. The application must contain information about a student’s academic record, leadership abilities, the honors and awards they’ve received and more.

All of those chosen as semi-finalists will go on to compete for the scholarships that will be offered next spring. More than 90 percent of the semi-finalists will be named as finalists for the scholarship. Of those finalists, about half will win a scholarship to attend college. Students will find out in February whether they make it to the finalist stage. The average NMS scholarships are only worth about $2,500, but to even be considered a semi-finalist is prestigious in the academic world.