5 Summit Students Named National Merit Semifinalists

SUMMIT, NJ — Five Summit students were named semifinalists in the prestigious National Merit Scholarship Program.

Two students from Kent Place School and three from Summit High School will continue to compete for some 7,250 National Merit Scholarships worth nearly $28 million that will be offered next spring.

The semifinalists from Kent Place are Nupur M. Ballal and Katherine A. Lyon. From Summit High School, the semifinalists are Sophia Fu, Ravi Naidu and Griffin Reinhardt-Hepler.

These students entered the 2023 National Merit Scholarship Program as juniors by taking the 2021 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.

In the next step of the process, in order to become a finalist, the semifinalist and a high school officials 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.

From over 16,000 semifinalists, more than 15,000 are expected to advance to the Finalist level, and in February they will be notified of this designation. All National Merit Scholarship winners will be selected from this group of Finalists.

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.

National Merit Scholarship winners of 2023 will be announced in four nationwide news releases beginning in April and concluding in July. These scholarship recipients will join nearly 368,000 other distinguished young people who have earned the Merit Scholar title.

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