4 Lower Merion High Schoolers Win National Merit Scholarships

ARDMORE, PA — Four students at Lower Merion High School have been named National Merit Scholarship winners.

Lower Merion's winners are Justin K. Badt, Maxwell Serota, Margaret Monahan, all of Bala Cynwyd; and Adin S. Wessels, of Bryn Mawr.

These four are among more than 4,100 college-sponsored award recipients.

Badt plans to study medicine at Vanderbilt University, which provided him the scholarship.

Serota's scholarship comes from Carleton College, where his probable field of study is law.

Monahan earned her scholarship from Tufts University. She plans to study biology.

And Wessels will pursue entrepreneurship while at Indiana University Bloomington, which provided him the scholarship.

Officials of each sponsor college selected their scholarship winners from among the finalists in the National Merit Scholarship Program who will attend their institution.

College-sponsored awards provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship.

This year, 160 colleges and universities are sponsoring Merit Scholarship awards.

Sponsor colleges include 85 private and 75 public institutions located in 42 states and the District of Columbia.

These distinguished high school graduates will receive scholarships for undergraduate study worth a total of nearly $30 million.

This year’s competition for National Merit Scholarships began when over 1.5 million juniors in about 21,000 high schools took the 2019 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants.

In September 2020, approximately 17,000 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 become a finalist, each semifinalist had to complete a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay, describing leadership positions and contributions in school and community activities, showing an outstanding academic record, and being endorsed and recommended by a high school official.

From the semifinalist group, some 16,000 attained finalist standing, and about half of the finalists were chosen to receive National Merit Scholarships