Six Shorecrest, Shorewood Seniors Named National Merit Semifinalists

Six seniors from Shorecrest and Shorewood High School, and a student from Lakeside who lives in Shoreline have qualified as 2013 National Merit Semifinalists.

From Shorecrest, they are Tzuria Falkenberg, Robert Kau and Jennifer Sui. From Shorewood, they are Nathan Hickman, Rebecca Yuen and Yi Zhou. From Lakeside School is Francis Wilson, who lives in Shoreline.

These students have the opportunity to compete for Merit Scholarship awards by qualifying as a National Merit Finalist. About 16,000 seniors nationwide will be competing for some 8,300 Merit Scholarships worth more than $32 million that will be awarded next spring.

More than 1.5 million juniors in nearly 21,000 high schools entered the 2013 National Merit Program by taking the 2011 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, which represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. The number of Semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state's percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.

To become a Finalist, a Semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by the school principal, and earn SAT scores that confirm the student's earlier qualifying test performance. Merit Scholar designees are selected on the basis of their skills, accomplishments, and potential for success in rigorous college studies, without regard to gender, race, ethnic origin, or religious preference.