High Life : A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : 20 Teens Win Merit Awards

Twenty high school students from Orange County are among the 2,000 winners of the prestigious 1992 National Merit Scholarship awards.

The awards recognize the nation’s top students as chosen by a committee of college admissions officers and school counselors on the bases of grades, test scores, contributions to the school and community and the students’ goals and interests.

Each winner will receive a $2,000 scholarship.

The county’s winning students:

Andrew Hughes and Karen Thomas (Corona del Mar); Katharine Eklof (Costa Mesa); Nam Yu (Edison); Chris Neumeyer (Esperanza); Stephen Wu (Foothill); Stephen Oh (Fountain Valley); Eric Wey (Huntington Beach); Thai Bui (Laguna Hills); Howard Chang (Loara High School); William Kahng (Marina); Russell Woo (Mater Dei); Grace Fu (Pacifica); Evelyn Kuo, Albert Chong and Jedidiah Yueh (Sunny Hills); Suerie Moon (University); Laura Kim (Valencia); Jason Kuan (Western), and Melissa Wong (Woodbridge).

Five Capistrano Valley High School students and their teacher were recently awarded a trip to Moscow when theirs became one of four Southern California teams to win the Ambassadors to Europe Competition.

The students made up one of 12 teams chosen from among a field of hundreds of schools to compete in the finals of the event, which tested the students’ knowledge of European history in an oral competition.

Capistrano Valley was the only Orange County school to qualify for the finals.

The event, which is sponsored by the Los Angeles Times in Education Program and Lufthansa German Airlines, was developed to further educational opportunities and promote knowledge of Moscow and Eastern Europe, organizers said.

The Capistrano Valley team members are Osvaldo Pereira, Chris Dirpes, Theresa Benefield, Geeta Bahl and Nicole Sahl.

They will be joined in Moscow by their faculty adviser, James Corbett, who is the newspaper adviser and a social science teacher at Capistrano Valley.

The students will leave for Moscow June 2. Their nine-day trip will include educational and sightseeing excursions, organizers said.

“A general rule of thumb that I find useful in deciding whether or not to watch a particular sport (on TV) is simply this: If Canada is better at it than us, don’t watch it. A perfect example of this would be men’s figure skating.”--Brian Lynn, in Golden Arrow, Woodbridge High School’s news magazine