Olivia Allen: Quad-Cities students succeed, set sights on National Merit Scholarship

While many scholarships or other student-centered awards start pooling in during the spring semester, some students in the Quad-Cities are already seeing the fruits of their academic labors pay off.

On Tuesday, Rock Island High School graduate Jesse Rockhold earned a $2,500 "GritGrant" from the Chicago-based McKenzie Foundation for his performance in Rocky's INCubator entrepreneurship program.

He was one of four students — from nearly 400 participating schools worldwide — to win this annual award, which recognizes INCubator students who have shown resilience and overcome adversity to reach their goals.

INCubator instructor Patricia Matson nominates students based on the following criteria:

Optimism, confidence and creativity.

Resilience.

Focus on meaningful goals.

Excellence.

Character as it refers to ways of thinking, acting and feeling that benefits both oneself and others.

Rocky is the only school in the INCubator international program with multiple GritGrant winners to date. Previous winners include Ravon Taylor-Johnson for the 2021-22 school year and Daivari Rogers in 2022-23.

As I've previously reported, multiple Iowa Quad-Cities students are semifinalists in the 2025 National Merit Scholarship Program, including:

Bettendorf High School: Connor Brooks.

Davenport North High School: Maxwell Geringer.

Pleasant Valley High School: Ayah Alsheikha, Shaha Bhugra, Jocelyn Bock, Henry Gannaway, Himanshu Jangid, Addison Judd, Kailee McCaw, Ameya Menon, Tanya Rastogi, Regan Resig, Bennett Teitle and Kelly Wu.

However, I haven't mentioned what it took for these students to get there. National Merit semifinalists represent less than 1% of high school seniors in the United States, meaning the aforementioned group had some of the highest-scoring PSAT scores compared to over 1.3 million test-takers nationwide.

To advance in the competition, each semifinalist must be recommended by a high school official; write an essay and have an exceptional academic record throughout high school. Semifinalists must also earn an ACT or SAT score that confirms their earlier performance on the qualifying PSAT test to advance.

The National Merit Scholarship Corporation will then choose approximately 15,000 finalists. Those selected will be notified in February.

Finalists will compete for one of 2,500 National Merit Scholarships (coincidentally, worth $2,500 each), around 770 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarships and roughly 3,600 college-sponsored Merit Scholarships, reserved for finalists who will attend the sponsor institution. The National Merit Scholarship Program offers nearly $26 million in scholarships each spring.

Last year's year's Quad-Cities National Merit Scholarship recipients:

Daniel Haley and Ben Milner, of Alleman High School.

Kaelee Wolf and Michael Farmer, of Bettendorf High School.

Angela Chen, of Davenport North High School.

Tyler Nels, of PV High School.

Farmer and Nels received a college-sponsored award.

Several local students were also 2024 National Merit semifinalists, including seven from PV and two from United Township High School, Abby Buck and Ben Saatoff.

To learn more about the National Merit Scholarship Program — or the impressive student recipients — visit www.nationalmerit.org .

Congrats to all QC-area recipients so far, and I invite our readers to join me in wishing our 2025 semifinalists the best of luck moving forward!

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