21 Plymouth-Canton Seniors Named National Merit Semifinalists

Plymouth-Canton Community Schools announced the names of 21 seniors who are semifinalists in the 59th annual National Merit Scholarship Program. 

About 1.5 million juniors in more than 22,000 high schools entered the 2014 scholarship program by taking the 2012 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. From that number, the list narrowed to 16,000 semifinalists, according to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC).

Canton High School semifinalists
Zain Ahmed
Neha Hafeez
Sharany Jayachandran
Justin Kelm
Prateek V. Sharma
Alex C. Yue

Plymouth High School semifinalists
Ryan J. Britton
Brandon Cheung
Madhuri Das
Amanah Fatima
Kevin M. Ni
Kevin L. Shi
Chithrin Sivashankar
Nikhil A. Tase
Jacob E. Tufts
Tiberiu S. Vilcu
William W. Zhang

Salem High School semifinalists
Hemanth K. Chittela
Shivan R. Patel
Nitin S. Ram
Krishna Vemulapalli

To become a finalist, students and their high schools must submit detailed scholarship applications. Students must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed by a high school official, write an essay and earn SAT scores that confirm their performance on the qualifying test, according to NMSC. 

About 15,000 students are expected to advance to the finalist level, and the scholarship winners will be selected from this group. 

There are three types of National Merit Scholarships that will be awarded in the spring:

• Every finalist will compete for one of 2,500 National Merit Scholarships for $2,500 that will be awarded on a state representational basis. 
• About 1,000 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards will be provided by approximately 240 corporations and business organizations for finalists who meet their specified criteria, such as children of the grantor’s employees or residents of communities where sponsor plants or offices are located.
• About 200 colleges and universities are expected to fund about 4,500 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for finalists who will attend the sponsor institution.