Three Students Named National Merit College-Sponsored Scholarship Winners

Three Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) graduates from the class of 2018 have been named winners of college-sponsored scholarships by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC).
Recipients of college-sponsored scholarships from the NMSC, with their probable career fields in parentheses, are:

• Siddharth Bhatnagar of Robinson Secondary School (engineering), National Merit University of Maryland Scholarship.
• Rounak Das of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) (computer science), National Merit University of Maryland Scholarship.
• Ajith Kanuri of TJHSST (computer science), National Merit University of Maryland Scholarship.

College-sponsored Merit Scholarships provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship. Nationwide, more than 7,500 students have won Merit Scholarship awards in 2018. This is the final group of scholarship recipients for the class of 2018.

National Merit Semifinalists are named each September in a state-representational basis in numbers proportional to each state’s percentage of the national total of graduating high school seniors. Semifinalists for 2018 are students with the highest scores on the 2016 Preliminary SAT-National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT-NMSQT®), which serves as an initial screen of program entrants.  Winners are chosen by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, which administers the program.

###