National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) recently announced over 1,000 additional winners of National Merit Scholarships financed by colleges and universities.
Three scholarship winners are from Garland ISD:
Alina B. Dam – GARLAND HIGH SCHOOL
Tisha S. Gautam – GARLAND HIGH SCHOOL
Zakkery J. Gilmore – NORTH GARLAND HIGH SCHOOL
Officials of each sponsor college selected their scholarship winners from among the Finalists in the program who will attend their institution. College-sponsored awards provide between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship. This year, 160 colleges and universities are sponsoring over 4,100 Merit Scholarship awards.
Additional college-sponsored Merit Scholarship winners
This final group of winners brings the number of 2021 National Merit Scholars to more than 7,500. These distinguished graduates will receive scholarships for undergraduate study worth nearly $30 million. In addition to college-sponsored awards, two other types of National Merit Scholarships were offered. There were 2,500 National Merit $2500 Scholarships, for which all Finalists competed. About 1,000 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards were for Finalists who met criteria specified by their grantor organizations.
2021 National Merit Scholarship competition
This year’s competition for scholarships began when over 1.5 million juniors in about 21,000 high schools took the 2019 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®). This test served as an initial screen of program entrants. In September 2020, approximately 17,000 Semifinalists were named on a state-representational basis in numbers proportional to each state’s percentage of the national total of graduating high school seniors. Semifinalists were the highest-scoring program entrants in each state. They represented less than 1% of the nation’s seniors.
To become a Finalist, each Semifinalist had to complete an application which included writing an essay, describing leadership positions and school and community activities. They had to have an outstanding academic record, and be endorsed and recommended by a high school official. From the Semifinalist group, 16,000 attained Finalist standing. About half of the Finalists were chosen to receive National Merit Scholarships.
NMSC, a nonprofit corporation that operates without government assistance, was founded in 1955 to conduct the program. Over the past 66 years, more than 360,000 young individuals have won scholarships worth nearly $1.3 billion.