Downingtown's high schools had 38 students in all named National Merit Semifinalists

DOWNINGTOWN, PA — Four Downingtown high schools jointly had 38 National Merit Scholarship semifinalists named in September.

Downingtown S.T.E.M. Academy had 23 semifinalists named. Downingtown High School West had four, Downingtown High School East had nine and Bishop Shanahan High School had two semifinalists.

The semifinalist list comes after high school juniors enter the 2022 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2020 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT). The nationwide pool of semifinalists represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors and 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.

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 the approximately 16,000 semifinalists, about 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.

The students who are National Merit Scholarship semifinalists, by their high schools are:

Downingtown High School West
Amanda C. Cleary
Anushka R. Levaku
Serene M. Pan
Joseph D. Zahiri

Downingtown S.T.E.M. Academy
Irene A. Abraham
Kushi Amara
Samrithaa Balakrishnan
Sarah R. Crawford
Shreesh Dassarkar
Arnav Dhingra
Mohith Gollapalli
Olivia A. Gulish
Nathan S. Jiang
Alice C. Liu
Ajay S. Macherla
Troy M. Ramiscal
Nandita C. Reddy
Siddhant Sharma
Shannon Shih
Pranay Sivaraju
Manuel M. Thomas
Maria A. Thomas
Aparna Vagvala
Dev Vidya Jijilal
Rohit Vipperla
Sophia Wu
Brandon Z. Ye

Bishop Shanahan High School
Leah M. Baker
Grace E. Watson

Downingtown High School East
Siri C. Dandu
Parsh Goel
Owen B. Hibshman
Rohan J. Kyada
Path Patel
Mahitha S. Penmetsa
Yash N. Rajpal
Rishab Srinivasan
Daniel Yu

Make sure you know what's happening in your town. Sign up to get Patch emails and don't miss any local news: https://patch.com/subscribe.