The 74 semifinalists were selected from more than 1.4 million juniors in more than 22,000 high schools who entered the 2015 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the PSAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, representing less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. The number of semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.
Fort Bend ISD’s 2015 National Merit Semifinalists by campus are:
Austin High School – Yuthika Gundamaraju, Victoria Hang, Hamza Khatri, Neelesh Mutyala, Alexander Yu, Kevin Zhang
Clements High School – Robaa Al-Najar, Allison Bellman, Mohankrishna Bhadriraju, Aaron Chang, Anthony Chaveleh, Kevin Chen, Chung Hon Michael Cheng, Arpam Dutta, Edward Hu, Michelle Huang, Steven Jiang, Kevin Jin, Tejas Kumar, Ethan Lau, Denise Lin, Alan Lo, Pranay Nakirekanti, David Nie, Kelsey Pownell, Jayen Ram, Angeline Rao, Anish Rao, Riya Santra, Arjun Talpallikar, Austin Tang, Zachary Tu, Aaditya Venkateswaran, Namrata Verghese, Shomik Verma, Anna Wang, Bowen Wang, Joshua Yang, Jeffrey Zhang, Jing Han Zhang, Kevin Zhang, Philip Zhou
Dulles High School – Pallavi Bannai, Megan Bates, Misha Chada, Anirudha Chatterjee, Sushain Cherivirala, Don Dao, Aalap Diwanji, Brendan D’Souza, Siddarth Guha, Grace Han, Ford Hash, Maxine Huang, Michelle Huang, Saiesh Kalva, Alexander Le, Carl Marth, Rishiprotim Nag, Joseph Nguyen, Lindsey Nguyen, Michelle Nguyen, Saket Sadani, Quynhanh Tran, Shashank Vura, Brent Zhang
Elkins High School – Lillian Wang
Hightower High School – Tina Shehni
Kempner High School – Anupriya Gupta, David Qui
Ridge Point High School – Jeremy Caldwell
Travis High School – Dong Huang, Sonia Mulayath, Caroline Pham
Approximately 15,000 of the semifinalists are expected to advance to the finalist level, and in February will be notified of this designation. Merit Scholar designees are selected on the basis of their skills, accomplishments and potential for success in rigorous college studies.