17 students from Hoover named National Merit semifinalists

At least 17 students from Hoover have been named semifinalists for the 2020 scholarships given out by the National Merit Scholarship Corp.

Seven of them are from Spain Park High School (Amaar Ebrahim, Alexander Laney, Marcus Mudano, Natalie Plourde, Janna Ren, Nicole Taylor and Jack Waters.), while eight are from Hoover High (Emma Farnlacher, Abhinay Gullapalli, Hudson Keller, Josephine Kim, Hannah Osborn, Benjamin Phillips, Thanushri Srikantha and Harsh Srinivasan).

Two others are from the Alabama School of Fine Arts (Ricardo Rouco-Crenshaw) and Briarwood Christian High School (Matthew Earnest).

The students were among about 16,000 semifinalists selected based on their performance on the 2018 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The nationwide pool of semifinalists are in the top 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors and include the highest-scoring entrants in each state.

Now, that list of 16,000 or so semifinalists will be whittled down to about 15,000 finalists, with selections being made in February, based on students’ skills, accomplishments and potential for success in rigorous college studies.

Students are judged based on their academic records throughout high school, recommendation letters from high school officials, written essays, and SAT or ACT scores that confirm the student’s performance on the PSAT.

Only about 7,600 students nationwide will be named National Merit Scholars, collectively earning more than $31 million in scholarships. Those scholarship recipients will be named in four announcements between April and July.

Three types of National Merit scholarships are offered. There will be 2,500 National Merit scholarships of $2,500 each given out, plus about 1,000 corporate-sponsored scholarships for finalists who meet those corporations’ criteria, and about 4,100 scholarships given out by colleges and universities for finalists who will attend their institution.

In addition to the 17 National Merit semifinalists, Spain Park High School also had two students recognized by the College Board’s National Hispanic Recognition Program: Nicolas Obregon and Julian Rodriguez. Each year, that program recognizes about 7,000 academically outstanding Hispanic/Latino high school juniors who take the PSAT/NMSQT.