Westport Student Receives National Merit Scholarship

WESTPORT, CT — National Merit Scholarship winners of college-sponsored scholarships were announced this week, and the list includes a student from Westport.

A total of 3,300 students were selected from a pool of 15,000 students from around the country.

From Westport, the winner is:

Nathan E. Wang, Staples High School
Probable career field: Undecided
National Merit Tufts University Scholarship

According to the not-for-profit National Merit Scholarship Corporation, the college-sponsored winners are the Finalists in each state "in the 2020 National Merit Scholarship Program who plan to attend their institution."

The awards range from between $500 and $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship, officials said.

Scholarship winners of $2,500 were announced last month.

Nearly 170 institutions of higher learning in the United States are sponsoring scholarships under the program in 2020.

This is from the corporation's announcement:

Over 1.5 million juniors in approximately 21,000 high schools entered the 2020
National Merit Scholarship Program when they took the 2018 Preliminary SAT/National Merit
Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. Last fall, approximately 16,000 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 and represented less than one percent of the nation’s seniors.

To compete for Merit Scholarship awards, Semifinalists first had to advance to the
Finalist level of the competition by fulfilling additional requirements. Each Semifinalist was asked to submit a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay and providing information about extracurricular activities, awards, and leadership positions. Semifinalists also had to have an outstanding academic record, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, and earn SAT® or ACT® scores that confirmed the qualifying test performance. From the Semifinalist group, some 15,000 met requirements for Finalist standing, and about half of the Finalists will be Merit Scholarship winners in 2020.

NMSC, a not-for-profit corporation that operates without government assistance, was established in 1955 to conduct the National Merit Scholarship Program. The majority of National Merit Scholarships provided each year are made possible by the support of approximately 400 independent corporate and college sponsors. These sponsors join NMSC in its efforts to enhance educational opportunities for America’s scholastically talented youth and to encourage the pursuit of academic excellence.