Four La Cañada Residents Awarded USC National Merit Scholarships
- Share via
Four La Cañada Flintridge residents each received a National Merit Scholarship in the last group of winners to be announced for the 2006 competition. The National Merit Scholarship Corp. has already announced three groups of winners, including the $2,500 awardees, corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship winners, and the first group of college-sponsored Merit Scholarship winners.
The National Merit Scholarship is a competition which awards graduating high school seniors with a scholarship of up to $2,000 annually for up to four years during their undergraduate study at participating colleges.
The PSAT/NMSQT is the initial step of becoming a winner of the National Merit Scholarship. Semifinalists are named by each student’s success on the PSAT/NMSQT as a junior. Semifinalists are the only students allowed to participate in the National Merit Scholarship competition, and they represented less than one percent of each state’s graduating seniors.
National Merit semifinalists, according to www.nationalmerit.org, “had to present an outstanding academic record, be endorsed and recommended by the school principal, earn SAT scores that confirm the qualifying test performance, and write an essay describing activities, interests, and goals.” Finalists were chosen and participating colleges chose the winners from those finalists who would attend their college.
The winners will receive a University of Southern California Merit Scholarship. Nicole Choi, an LCHS graduate, will plans to pursue a career field of business.
Megan Teodo, another graduate from La Cañada High School, will probably pursue a career field of business administration.
Ankur Mehra from Flintridge Prepatory School plans to pursue a career field in medicine.
La Cañada resident Philip Kim, a graduate of Polytechnic School in Pasadena, will probably pursue a career field of business.
USC is a private university located in Los Angeles. It enrolls nearly 12,000 students in its graduate program and nearly 14,000 students in its undergraduate program.