Six University City High School Students Named as National Merit Scholar Semifinalists
by Rich Miller
September 29, 2008
Nils Carlsson, Thomas Kenyon, Zachary Levinson, Adam Mizes, Matthew Shafer-Skelton and Nicholas Shafer-Skelton are semifinalists in the 2009 National Merit Scholarship Program.
Carlsson, Kenyon, Levinson, Mizes and the Shafer-Skeltons are among 16,000 high school seniors from across the nation who will compete for some 8,200 Merit Scholarship awards worth $33 million next spring. They entered the 2009 competition by taking the 2007 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. All six University City High School seniors will be notified in April if they advance as Finalists.
To be a Finalist, a Semifinalist must have a high performing academic record, be endorsed and recommended by the school principal and earn SAT scores that confirm the student’s earlier qualifying test performance. About 90 percent of Semifinalists advance to the Finalist stage of the scholarship program. Half of those are selected as National Merit Scholarship winners.
Three other University City High School students – Stefan Bach, Eli Katz and Carol Simpson were designated as National Merit Scholarship Program Commended Students. Commended Students place among the top five percent of the more than one million students who took the 2007 PSAT test. Although recognized for outstanding academic performance, they will not compete in the 2009 National Merit Scholarship Program.
