2 Port Washington Students Win National Merit Scholarships

PORT WASHINGTON, NY — Two high school students from Port Washington have been named winners of the 2021 National Merit Scholarship.

A total of 27 students from Long Island schools were among the 3,100 winners nationwide announced Wednesday, selected from a pool of more than 16,000 finalists. These awards offer between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship, according to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation.

Another round of winners will be announced in July, bringing the total number of college-sponsored Merit Scholarship recipients in 2021 to about 4,000.

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 from Port Washington:

Jacob T. Schorr

• Probable career field: Computer Science
• School: Paul D. Schreiber High School
• Scholarship funded by: Vanderbilt University — Nashville, Tennessee

Erik Tang

• Probable career field: Bioengineering
• School: Paul D. Schreiber High School
• Scholarship funded by: Northeastern University — Boston, Massachusetts

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.