Local Secaucus Teen Named Nat'l Merit Semi-Finalist

SECAUCUS, NJ — A single student at High Tech High School in Secaucus qualified to be a semi-finalist in the extremely competitive National Merit Scholarship program.

That student is Eshaan Mangat, 18, a senior at High Tech. Eshaan also lives in Secaucus (High Tech pulls students from all over Hudson County.) You can read an interview with him here (he's on the right). After college, he wants to be a quantitative analyst, as he says "They pretty much predict stock behavior using math."

High Tech is magnet public high school and students have to apply to get in. The school is technically part of Hudson County's vo-tech program, and High Tech has steadily grown in prestige over the years. High Tech has a strong emphasis on science and technology, but they also teach students interested in pursuing the arts (dance, theater, music and audio tech) and culinary arts and hospitality. Students have "majors" where they prepare to enter various careers immediately after graduation, should they choose.

High Tech relocated its campus from North Bergen to Secaucus last year. Here's a tour inside their Laurel Hill campus when they opened last fall.

The National Merit semi-finalists were announced Wednesday, Sept. 11. Eshaan is part of 16,000 semi-finalists nationwide, representing less than 1 percent of all high-school seniors in the U.S.

To give you an idea of just how competitive selection is, many New Jersey high schools, both public and private, had no students selected. No student from Secaucus High School qualified. No student from the Clifton or Rutherford school districts qualified either, or from any of the area's Catholic high schools.

However, vo-tech magnet schools like High Tech heavily ranked the list: Nearly 30 students qualified from Bergen County Academies, a magnet tech school in Hackensack, and several students qualified from Bergen County Technical High School in Teterboro.

Two students qualified from Montclair Kimberly Academy, a local prep school.

How are students chosen as National Merit semi-finalists? All juniors are automatically enrolled when they take the PSATs; a score above 212 qualifies. That is about 50,000 of the highest-scoring PSAT students in the nation. From there, the semi-finalists are further winnowed down by state, and the final number per state is in proportion to a state's population (i.e., New Jersey will have more National Merit semi-finalists than North Dakota.)

The average NMS scholarships are only worth about $2,500, but to even be considered a semi-finalist is prestigious in the academic world.