Newtown Square Senior Wins College-Sponsored Merit Scholarship

NEWTOWN SQUARE, PA — A Newtown Square high school senior was recently the named winner of a National Merit Scholarships financed by a university.

This student is among more than 3,300 winners nationwide.

Below are details on Newtown Square's winner:

Gwendolyn B. Pohlmann, Newtown Square — Academy Of Notre Dame De Namur, Villanova

• Probable career field: Ecology
• National Merit University Of Miami Scholarship
  • The University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, is a private, independent, international university. About 14,000 students from 50 states and over 100 countries are enrolled. Undergraduate programs are offered in over 50 areas of study, and there are over 100 programs offered at the master's and doctoral levels. The libraries contain more than one million volumes. The Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science is one of 11 academic divisions of the university.

Officials of each sponsor college selected their scholarship winners from among the finalists in the 2020 National Merit Scholarship Program who plan to attend their institution.

These awards provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship.

Sponsor colleges and universities include 92 private and 75 public institutions located in 43 states and the District of Columbia.

Additional recipients of college-sponsored awards will be announced on July 13.

By the conclusion of this year’s competition, about 7,600 academic champions will have won National Merit Scholarships worth more than $30 million.

College-sponsored Merit Scholarship winners announced today are a part of the distinguished group of about 7,600 high school seniors who will receive National Merit Scholarships for college undergraduate study worth over $30 million.

More than 1.5 million juniors in about 21,000 high schools entered the 2020 National Merit Scholarship Program when they took the 2018 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants.

Last fall, approximately 16,000 Semifinalists were named on a state-representational basis in numbers proportional to each state’s percentage of the national total of graduating high school seniors.

Semifinalists were the highest-scoring program entrants in each state and represented less than one percent of the nation’s seniors.

To compete for Merit Scholarship awards, semifinalists first had to advance to the
Finalist level of the competition by fulfilling additional requirements.

Each semifinalist was asked to submit a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay and providing information about extracurricular activities, awards, and leadership positions. Semifinalists also had to have an outstanding academic record, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, and earn SAT or ACT scores that confirmed the qualifying test performance.

From the semifinalist group, some 15,000 met requirements for finalist standing, and about half of the finalists will be Merit Scholarship winners in 2020.