On Wednesday, September 13, officials of National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) announced the Semifinalists in the 63rd annual National Merit Scholarship Program – including 21 BASIS Independent Silicon Valley students. These academically talented high school seniors have an opportunity to continue in the competition for some 7,500 National Merit Scholarships worth more than $32 million that will be offered next spring.
About 1.6 million juniors in more than 22,000 high schools entered the 2018 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2016 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, representing less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state.
“Each of these students deserves this amazing honor,” said Toby Walker, BASIS Independent Silicon Valley Head of School. “Our program infuses students with a love of learning. There are many ways to demonstrate that passion. This is one of those ways, and we’re proud of them.”
The honored students at BASIS Independent Silicon Valley are:
Nitya Baddam | Alvin Kin
William Cao | Vinay Krishna
Bethany Chen | Rishab Mitra
Brian Chen | Sergey Pavlov
Pavan Gowda | Aaron Sun
Christopher He | Anushree Thekkedath
Kimberly Hou | Nikki Wang
Jerry Huang | Patrick Wang
Shrivats Kannan | Angela Ye
Eish Kapoor | Lorne Zhang
Shreya Khandewale
From the approximately 16,000 Semifinalists, about 15,000 are expected to advance to the Finalist level, and in February they will be notified of this designation. All National Merit Scholarship winners will be selected from this group of Finalists. The scholarship winners of 2018 will be announced in four nationwide news releases beginning in April and concluding in July. These scholarship recipients will join more than 330,000 other distinguished young people who have earned the Merit Scholar title.
On behalf of all BASIS Independent Schools, we are so proud of you - and of all of our students -for your continual academic achievements both big and small. Please join us in congratulating our incredible Bobcats in the comments below: