National Merit Scholar Named From Druid Hills High School

DECATUR, GA — The next group of 2021 National Merit Scholarship winners includes one Druid Hills High School student.

The National Merit winner from Decatur is among the more than 3,100 announced nationally this year to receive between $500 and $2,000 scholarships from colleges and universities across the country, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation said in a news release Wednesday.

William F. Wainwright, from Druid Hills High School, is a National Merit Emory University Scholarship winner for 2021. His probable career field is political science.

Emory College is the undergraduate division of Emory University, a private, coeducational university located in suburban Atlanta. With more than 3,000 students and a 12-to-1 student-faculty ratio, the college provides the advantages of individual attention plus the resources of a major university. Emory also offers undergraduate schools of business administration and nursing, and graduate schools of arts and sciences, dentistry, law, medicine, allied health, and theology.

The National Merit winners announced this week will have their scholarships funded by the colleges and universities that they will attend. One hundred and sixty colleges and universities — including 85 private and 75 public schools — took part in the merit scholarship program in 2021.

An additional group of college-sponsored National Merit scholars will be announced in July, the scholarship corporation said. This group is part of the approximately 7,500 National Merit scholarship winners who will be selected by the end of 2021. National Merit scholarships via corporate-sponsored awards and the corporation's own $2,500 scholarships were announced earlier in the spring.

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More than 1.5 million juniors nationally entered the 2021 National Merit scholarship program when they took the 2019 preliminary SAT/National Merit scholarship qualifying test, the corporation said. About 17,000 semifinalists, fewer than 1 percent of the country's high school seniors, were announced last fall.

Semifinalists had to write an essay and detail their extracurricular activities, awards and leadership positions to become a finalist. About half of the 16,000 finalists will be merit scholars by the end of the year, the corporation said.

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