Cupertino students shine in scholarship program
Dozens of Cupertino High School students are among 16,000 named as semifinalists in the 66th annual National Merit Scholarship program. The semifinalists will now compete for 7,600 scholarships worth more than $30 million, which will be given out next year.
More than 1.5 million high school juniors in about 21,000 schools across the country took the qualifying test for the 2021 merit program. Semifinalists, whose academic achievements mean they represent less than 1 represent of American high school students, include the highest-scoring entrants in each state.
Each finalist will compete for a $2,500 scholarship. About 1,000 corporate-sponsored scholarships also will be awarded through the program. About 180 colleges and universities are expected to finance an additional 4,100 college-sponsored scholarships for the finalists.
Homeschoolers Emily Moeller and Abigail Wong are among the Cupertino semifinalists. In the running from Cupertino High School are Diya Aggarwal, Dilara Baysal, Gargi Deshpande, Pranav Deshpande,
Lawrence Fan, Agrim Gupta, Jeffrey Ke, Rhea Khadye, Jacob Kim, Pallavi Kondayapalepu, Aryan Kumar, Preetha Kumar, Michael Lo, Venkat Nandi, Manvi Nawani, Vibhav Rajkumar, Royce Ren, Sohom Roy, Ji Won Son, Shanlea Tabofunda, Krithika Venkatasubramanian and Patrick Zhu.
Homestead High semifinalists are Claire Chen, Hansel Desouza, Ruchika Dixit, Isabelle Fejes, Edwin He, Joseph Huang, Shishir Iyer, Andrea Li, Eddie Li, Coline Luo, Rebecca Ma, Eric Pedley, Samarth Shah, Siddharth Shah, Samrudh Shenoy, Erin Su, Calix Tang, Sahil Venkatesan, Cynthia
Wang, Julia Wang, Daniel Wehbeh, Kevin Xu, Junghwa Yoo and Arnold Zhou.
The crowded field of semifinalists from Monta Vista High includes Parth Asawa, Cheryl Bai, Katerina Baxter, Janya Budaraju, Ramya Chamkeri, Alexander Chau, Annie Chen, Grace Chen, Padmanabh Aman Desai, Elijah Diaz, Ria Doshi, Justin Feng, Sathvika Gopalasetty, Krishnanshu Gupta, Meha Gupta, Namrata Harish, Isabella He, Stephen Ho, Zhenda Hu, Rachel Huang; Pragya Kallanagoudar, Ritu Karivaradasamy, Saarang Kashyap, Prisha Khatwani, Rachel Kim, Tae Kyu Kim, Sai Vishal Koppuru, Akshara
Kuduvalli, Kyle Kumar, Eric Lee, Kevin Lin, Andie Liu, Robert Liu, Jasmine Lu, Fiona Luo, Suraj Mathashery, Sruthi Mikkilineni, Nakul Nayak; Akash Palla, Eshani Patel, Kavya Patel, Adithya Patil, Ritesh Patro, Aaryan Prakash, Navya Rao, Arnav Raut, Gayatri Rithe, Saadiq Shaikh, Emily Shen, Tanush Talati, Dinesh Thirumavalavan, Alyssa Umino, Claire Wen, Kaif Xiao, Brandon Xu, Brian Xu, Serena Yip, Eric Zhang, James Zhang, Winbert Zhang, Alice Zhou, Natalie Zhou and Bryan Zhu.
Contact Anne Gelhaus at 408-200-1051.