Three Point Loma residents attending the Bishop’s School in La Jolla have been named National Merit Finalists. Sarah Brown, John Lazar, Russell Nickel and ten other Bishop’s seniors will compete for the academic distinction and $2,500 in college tuition money that the scholarship promises.
“I’m excited about the opportunities that it has opened up for me,” Brown said of qualifying as a finalist.
In addition to 13 finalists, Bishop’s class of 2006 contains a record-setting 24 commended students. Last year’s graduating class contained 11 finalists and 20 commended students. The class of 2004 had five National Merit Scholars, 10 finalists and 15 commended students.
“We’ve had numbers close to this [year’s] almost every year,” said Suzanne Weiner, the school’s marketing director. “It speaks about the students”Bishop’s is an academically excellent school, but it’s the students who reach this achievement.”
Roughly 8,200 winners will be selected from a pool of 15,000 finalists, included among them are the Bishop’s students. To make it this far, however, is an honor in and of itself.
“I’m really proud of the accomplishment,” Brown said. “I’ve worked hard, so it’s very nice to see that I have qualified.”
The National Merit Scholarship Competition begins with the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which is usually taken during a student’s junior year. Of the 1.3 million annual entrants nationwide, 50,000 are picked for their high test scores and for meeting the following requirements: full-time enrollment, plans for attending college the fall following their high school graduation and U.S. citizenship or permanent residency.
One-third of the qualifiers, or 16,000 students, move on to the semi-finals, while the remaining 34,000 are commended for their accomplishments.
“I was pretty excited about qualifying as a semi-finalist,” said Nickel of the most competitive round of the scholarship process. Lazar agreed, saying that the subsequent eliminations offer much better odds.
The semi-finalist group is further narrowed during the fall of their senior year by a series of academic prerequisites. Among the requirements, students must be endorsed by their school’s principal, submit a transcript demonstrating a consistently high academic performance throughout their high school years, complete an application and have their SAT scores sent for review.
Fifteen thousand finalists were notified of their status in a letter sent out on Feb. 8. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) will begin notifying the first round of recipients on March 10.
Corporations, company foundations, businesses, colleges, universities and private enterprise fund all scholarships.
Nickel has been accepted to Stanford and the University of Southern California (USC); Lazar has been accepted to Stanford, although he is considering other schools; and Brown has not yet heard from her top choices of USC and the University of California, Berkeley.
The Bishop’s School is a college preparatory private day school for grades seven through 12.