Central Florida’s National Merit semifinalists announced
More than 100 Central Florida high school students are semifinalists in the National Merit Scholarship Program, meaning their scores on the PSAT — a preliminary version of the SAT college admissions exam — were among the very best in Florida.
Nationwide, there are about 16,000 semifinalists, a group of “academically talented” students representing less than 1 percent of the country’s high school seniors, according to the National Merit Scholarship Organization, which recently released the list of winners.
About 90 percent of the semifinalists will go onto be finalists and about half of those will win a scholarship, the organization said. The program aims to honor the nation’s “scholastic champions” and encourage the “pursuit of academic excellence.”
In Central Florida, the 108 semifinalists are found across the region. Trinity Preparatory School near Winter Park had the most winners (17), followed by Seminole High School in Sanford (16).
The semifinalists are listed below by their high school’s hometown. The entire list of Florida winners is here. Parnika Agrawal, Joshua Fu, Paul R Hughes, Pooja Kanumalla, Alexander B Stewart, Julia Wu, Jackson L Zboril
Lake Nona High School: Alexandria L Bias, Rebecca E Poole, Kadambari Vyas
Olympia High School: Brenden J Berrios, Blake W Bradford, Jake B Shannin, Jasmin S Singh
Orlando Science Schools: Russell M Abedeen, Kevin J Rocha
Dr Phillips High School: Talib Hakim, Peter Toma
Timber Creek High School: Christopher J Herrera, Abigail McConnell, Wendy M Stein
University High School: Isha Verma
Hagerty High School: Katarina R Harrison, Yun Miao, Connor A Rodriguez, Ryan T Self
Oviedo High School: DennisXavier Antony, Morgan A Gunter, Mark A McCreary
Crooms Academy of Information Technology: Alex Quach
Seminole High School: Alex S Bell, Caitlin K Chen, Jack C Dellenger, Vishal Dubey, Mong-En Z Ip, Karthik Jarugula, Malavika Kannan, Elyse W Larson, Evelyn C Larson, Lu Lu, Cyriac Manjaly, Amixadai J Miranda-Hernandez, Anderson T Moonguaklang, David Z Mowbray, Withanage R Perera, Kenni Sukhadia