Seven Rockville Students Win National Merit Scholarships

ROCKVILLE, MD — Seven high school students from Rockville have been named winners of the 2021 National Merit $2,500 Scholarship.

A total of 26 students from Montgomery County schools were among the 2,500 winners nationwide announced Wednesday, selected from a pool of more than 16,000 finalists.

This is the second group of National Merit Scholarship winners to be announced this year. In April, more than 1,000 recipients of the corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship were named.

Additional winners will be named in June and July. By the end of the year, about 7,500 students will have won merit scholarships totaling more than $30 million. The money can be put toward any regionally accredited college or university in America.

A panel of college admissions officers and high school counselors evaluated students on a number of criteria — including grades, the difficulty of courses, standardized test scores, and contributions both inside and outside the classroom.

Here are the winners who attend schools in Rockville:

Jane A. Trainor

• Probable career field: Medicine

• School: Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School

Benjamin Kwiatkowski

• Probable career field: Biomedical Engineering

• School: Col. Zadok Magruder High School

Amy X. He

• Probable career field: Healthcare

• School: Thomas Sprigg Wootton High School

Daniel S. Hwang

• Probable career field: Public Health

• School: Thomas Sprigg Wootton High School

Jaxon D. Lee

• Probable career field: Computer Science

• School: Rockville High School

Jennifer J. Li

• Probable career field: Computer Science

• School: Thomas Sprigg Wootton High School

Tekoa Sultan-Reisler

• Probable career field: Environmental Policy

• School: Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy

The merit scholarship program was created in 1955. Students in grades nine through 12 vie for academic recognition and financial support.

This year's program began in October 2019. More than 1.5 million juniors at approximately 21,000 high schools took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants, according to officials. Only 17,000 of the highest scorers had the opportunity to continue in this competition.

The number of winners in each state was proportional to the state's share of the nation's graduating high school seniors, according to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation.