Seventeen Seniors have won national and corporate-sponsored scholarship programs for college. Seniors Amy Chen ’07 of Newton; Courtney Fiske ’07 of Andover; Yunsoo Kim ’07 of Ando-ver; Prateek Kumar ’07 of Latham, New York; Erika Roddy ’07 of San Francisco, California; Dougal Sutherland ’07 of Centerport, New York; and Jiyuan Zhu of Andover were given National Merit Finalist status. Each was honored with a National Merit Scholarship, a $2,500 award, among 2,500 other high school Seniors in the nation. Students qualify for the National Merit scholarship initially through results on the Preliminary Scholastic Achievement Test/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT), which most Andover students take during their Upper year. Those who have qualified as semifinalists based on their scores, when compared against other students from Massachusetts, go on to complete a longer application process to become finalists and hopefully recipients, which includes essays, recommendations, grade reporting and SAT scores. Thirty semifinalists came from PA this year among the sixteen thousand nationwide, which is an impressive feat, considering that Massachusetts’ Selection Index on the test was the nation’s highest. at 224, which means that PA students needed to place toward the top of the 99th percentile nationwide to qualify even as semifinalists. Also honored were the five recipients of the National Merit Achievement Scholarship, a program established by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) in 1964 for African-American students. Those Seniors are Christopher Adams ’07 of Andover; Ola Canty ’07 of Washington, D.C.; Jared Cheatham ’07 of Shaker Heights, Ohio; Kara Hollis ’07 of Roswell, Georgia; and Alan Wesson ’07 of Harvey, Louisiana. Each student, among 800 honorees nationwide, will receive a one-time stipend of $2,500. Hollis explained that she didn’t lose any sleep over the outcome of the PSAT. “I was glad when I won it, but I didn’t worry too much about the test,” she said. “$2,500 might seem a little insignificant when college is $60,000, though,” she explained. She will attend Harvard in the fall. Five more Seniors were included among the recipients of National Merit scholarships, as Rebecca Agostino ’07 of Andover; Betina Evancha ’07 of Haverhill; Sean Hilton ’07 of Duluth, Georgia; Tianyuan Zheng ’07 of Northborough; and Devon Zimmerling ’07 of Lakewood, Colo-rado won college-sponsored, special or corporate-sponsored scholarships. Zheng, who will attend MIT in the fall, was honored by the Motorola Foundation National Merit Scholarship, which is sponsored by the telecommunications company for children of its employees. The corporate-sponsored scholarships can also be awarded to students within a company’s community or those students who have career plans encouraged by the sponsor. He explained that students who became semifinalists for National Merit Scholarships were then asked to complete a brief application and, depending on the application and SAT scores, were awarded the scholarships. He will receive $2,000 yearly during his undergraduate education. Corporate, college-sponsored scholarships can provide stipends for each of four years of undergraduate study, with awards ranging from $5,000 – $10,000. According to data from the College Counseling Office, PA was more successful this year in gar-nering awards from the NMSC than they had been in the previous two. A total of 17 merit-based awards were given this year, while 13 seniors in the Class of 2006 received them and 16 members of the Class of 2005 won awards. Moreover, the graduating class had more winners both of the National Merit Scholarships and of the National Merit Achievement Scholarships compared to the Class of 2006, where four students were honored for the former, compared to seven this year, and only one for the latter, compared to five this year. Furthermore, 30 students were named as semifinalists from the Class of 2007, while only 24 from the Class of 2006 earned that distinction which is bestowed on less than one percent of high school students in the nation.
