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Editor’s Note: Vikram Sambasivan is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Knight Writers; however, he was one of only three to be awarded the status of National Merit Semifinalist.
Every year, students from each state who receive the highest Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) scores in the state are recognized as National Merit Scholar Semifinalists. On Wednesday, Sept. 13, the Robinson students who qualified as National Merit Semifinalists were announced. The Robinson students who qualified, Ro Diaz, Christian Noriega and Vikram Sambasivan, are among the highest scorers in the state of Florida.
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation selects around 16,000 semifinalists each year using their own selection index. This selection index measures a student’s performance on all the sections of the PSAT.
After qualifying as a semifinalist, students then must fulfill a set of requirements to advance to the finalist level. In order to do so, semifinalists must fill out a finalist application, write an essay, have a consistently high academic record, receive a recommendation from a teacher and earn a score on the SAT or ACT that confirms their performance on the PSAT/NMSQT.
Noriega is already preparing to complete these requirements, after receiving the exciting news.
“I’ll research what they expect from finalists,” Noriega said. “I’m not an outstanding writer, [but] I’m going to decimate these essays.”
Although this application process does add to the already heavy workload of these seniors, overall, they were excited about achieving this honor.
“It [becoming a National Merit Semifinalist] was surprising, both because I didn’t know how they qualified semifinalists and also because I forgot people were declared semifinalists in the first place,” Diaz said. “While it does cause some additional stress with the secondary application process, it was a pleasant surprise.”
These semifinalists will find out if they qualify to become National Merit Finalists in early February. Around 15,000 of the 16,000 semifinalists become finalists. However, only around 7,000 of those finalists will be awarded a National Merit Scholarship.
Although it is a great achievement to have students who have received the honor of becoming National Merit Semifinalists, there are significantly fewer finalists at Robinson than there have been in the past. Some might say that this could be because the class of 2024 was greatly affected by COVID during their freshman year, but Principal David Brown believes it isn’t out of the ordinary.
“It just depends on that particular year how kids are doing. We could sit here and think about it and say ‘yeah, maybe COVID [caused the drop in Robinson’s number of National Merit Semifinalists],’ but the whole country went through COVID,” Brown remarked. “I can’t tell you, it just kind of goes up and down. If you look back at not just our school, but other schools as well, sometimes they have three or four and sometimes it’s 12 or 13. It just kind of comes and goes.”
However, this decrease in the number of National Merit Semifinalists does not make it any less of an achievement. The possibility of becoming a National Merit Scholar can be an impressive addition to students’ university applications.
“One of the factors that goes into ranking colleges is the number of National Merit Scholars they have, however, the results are not released until after colleges make their decisions,” Sambasivan said. “So, if I become a finalist, I have a chance of becoming a National Merit Scholar which might make colleges more likely to accept me.”
