Westwood Student Named National Merit Scholar

WESTWOOD, NJ — A Westwood student is among the last 1,000 named as National Merit Scholars in 2021, joining more than 7,500 high school students across the country.

Peter Z. Mitelman, who attended Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, will likely study economics at Brandeis University near Boston.

This batch of scholarships is are financed by colleges and universities, which provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for undergraduate study.

This year, 160 colleges and universities are sponsoring over 4,100 Merit Scholarship awards.

National Merit Scholars in 2021 received scholarships for their undergraduate studies worth nearly $30 million. This year’s competition for National Merit Scholarships began when over 1.5 million juniors in about 21,000 high schools took the 2019 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.

Roughly 17,000 students became semifinalists based on their scores, representing less than 1 percent of the nation's seniors. To become a finalist, each semifinalist had to complete a detailed scholarship application. The process included writing an essay, describing leadership positions and contributions in school and community activities, and getting endorsed and recommended by a high school official.

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