FCPS students named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists
Students from four Frederick County Public high schools were announced as 2025 National Merit Scholarship Program semifinalists on Sept. 11.
The semifinalists are:
Middletown High School
* Shirsho Banerjee
Oakdale High School
* Ryan Emery
Urbana High School
* Rohit Chintala
* Arushi Patel
* Sudar Senthil
* Elizabeth Simkin
* Nicholas Valerio
Walkersville High School
* Henry VanOrden
The National Merit Scholarship Program is an academic competition for undergraduate scholarships, according to the National Merit Scholarship Corp.'s website.
Semifinalists for the 2025 program began the screening process in 2023 by taking the Preliminary SAT, which also serves as the Scholarship Qualifying Test, according to a press release.
The semifinalists nationwide had the highest-scoring results in their respective states. The number of semifinalists per state depends on the number of graduating seniors in the state compared to the national total, according to the release.
The National Merit Scholarship Program offers three types of scholarships for the spring of 2025. There are 2,500 National Merit $2,500 scholarships, about 770 corporate-sponsored scholarships for specific criteria, and about 3,600 scholarships sponsored by colleges and universities.
More than 16,000 semifinalists were recognized nationwide, and more than 15,000 of them are expected to advance to the finalist level, according to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation.
The organization said it will announce the 2025 National Merit Scholarship winners between April and July of 2025.
