14 Ridge Students Named 2026 National Merit Semifinalists

BASKING RIDGE, NJ — 14 Ridge Regional High School students have been named semi-finalists for the 2026 National Merit Scholarship Program. (See the list below)

The semi-finalists were announced on Sept. 10 and include around 16,000 high-school seniors who will go on to compete for the scholarships that will be offered next spring.

According to a press release from the National Merit Scholarship Program, about 95 percent of the semi-finalists will be named as finalists for the scholarship. Of those finalists, about half will win a scholarship.

More than 1.3 million juniors in about 20,000 high schools entered the 2026 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2024 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants.

The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, representing 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.

RIDGE HIGH SCHOOL

• Bharath, Adithya
• Bonura, Brandon M.
• Gupta, Milie
• Iyer, Aparna
• Kannan, Keerthisri
• Luo, Kaden S.
• Mitra, Arnob
• Murali, Sanjana
• Peng, Hsien Xin
• Sha, Ethan
• Shen, Vivian J.
• Yin, Annabel
• Yuan, Ziran
• Zhao, Ryan

PINGRY SCHOOL

• Brisson, William A.
• Castiglione, Hannah G.
• Huang, Edward H.
• Jin, Sebastian C.
• Jung, Katherine
• Lee, Anderson
• Luo, Tingting T.
• Overdeck, William G.
• Park, Jonah H.
• Smith, Owen P.
• Subramanian, Arjun
• Wu, Albert
• Xie, Victoria P.
• Zhou-Zheng, Christian Y.

To become a Finalist, the Semifinalist and a high school official must submit a detailed scholarship application, in which they provide information about the Semifinalist’s academic record, participation in school and community activities, demonstrated leadership abilities, employment, and honors and awards received.

A Semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, write an essay, and earn SAT® or ACT® scores that confirm the student’s earlier performance on the qualifying test.

National Merit Scholarship winners of 2026 will be announced in four nationwide news releases beginning in April and concluding in July.

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