The National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) announced that 25 Lake Washington School District (LWSD) high school seniors qualified as semifinalists in the 56th annual National Merit Scholarship Program.
A total of 16,000 academically talented high school seniors nationwide have qualified. These students will have the opportunity to continue in the competition for some 8,300 National Merit Scholarships, worth more than $34 million, that will be offered next spring.
Students qualified for these awards by completing the 2010 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants.
The nationwide pool of semifinalists, which represents less than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state.
Redmond High School had the highest number of recipients in the district, with 14 students named as semifinalists.
Lake Washington School District National Merit semifinalists are: Eastlake High School: Blake Crinklaw; International Community School: Pauline H. Chane, Edward M. Cordell, Jessica S. Jin, and Jack D. Speelman; Juanita High School: Audrey H. Hsu, Sam H. Schwabacher, and Luke Sironski-White; Lake Washington High School: Peter J. Dolan, Suejean Hwangpo, and Jake O. Nash; Redmond High School: Maya N. Balakrishnan, Tara G. Balakrishnan, Rebecca F. Ballantyne, Michael A. Gilroy, Benjamin C. Keller, Jihoon Lee, Nolan A. Miller, Ananya Murali, Preetum Nakkiran, Kevin R. Parker, Dhaaruni Sreenivas, Sophia Y. Xu, Miriam C. Zeitz, and Edward C. Zhang.
