Claire Sheen, a senior at MMI, has been notified she is a Semifinalist in the 2015 National Merit Scholarship Program.
Sheen is one of the academically talented high school seniors who have an opportunity to continue in the competition for some 7,600 National Merit Scholarships worth about $33 million that will be offered next spring.
About 1.4 million juniors in more than 22,000 high schools entered the 2015 National Merit Scholarship Program, the 60th year of the program, by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of Semifinalists, representing less than 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors, 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.
Sheen is the daughter of Kwangsup and Chaeyun Sheen of Mountaintop.
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.
Three types of National Merit Scholarships will be offered in the spring of 2015. Every Finalist will compete for one of 2,500 National Merit® $2,500 Scholarships that will be awarded on a state-representational basis. About 1,000 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards will be provided by approximately 240 corporations and business organizations for Finalists who meet their specified criteria, such as children of the grantor’s employees or residents of communities where sponsor plants or offices are located. In addition, about 200 colleges and universities are expected to finance some 4,100 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for Finalists who will attend the sponsor institution.
These scholarship recipients will join more than 308,000 other distinguished young people who have earned the Merit Scholar title.
NMSC, a not-for-profit organization that operates without government assistance, was established in 1955 specifically to conduct the annual National Merit Scholarship Program. Scholarships are underwritten by NMSC with its own funds and by approximately 440 business organizations and higher education institutions that share NMSC’s goals of honoring the nation’s scholastic champions and encouraging the pursuit of academic excellence.
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