National Merit Semi-Finalist scholars were recognized this morning for their achievement from last year’s PSAT test. These students took the test in October of last year, just now getting the results. Many of the students had been preparing for months, maybe even years.

“My parents started sending me to SAT practice classes starting around 8th grade during weekends and after school, and during the summer,” Matthew Jiang ‘17 said. “None of them lasted particularly long, and most of them were mainly focused on the writing section because that was my main weakness. I practiced extracurricular courses and had one or two practice books for me to self study with.”

Westwood’s 2016-2017 Merit Scholars outnumber every other central Texas school. Although our students scored very high, not all of them were expecting the honor.

“It was a standardized test which I was pretty thoroughly prepared for,” Jiang said. “I wasn’t really paying attention to National Merit, and before I just did my best on the PSAT, I didn’t really have a particular goal to achieve National Merit, I just did my best and if I got into the threshold then I would decide what to do from there. I wouldn’t say I was surprised but I wasn’t really expecting it.”

The official list of Westwood 2016-2017 Merit Semi-Final Scholars is below.

Joel Abraham

Cameron Adams

Akshay Aggarwal

Justin Alpern

Alexander Andrews

Natalie Bayer

Logan Bowan

Ethan Brown

Divya Choudhury

Anne Chow

Shreya Dasari

Ashley D’Souza

Matthew Frizzell

Lakshmi Gangavarapu

Elizabeth Hosmer

Austin Huang

Macklyn Hutchison

Claire Jahnke

Matthew Jiang

Abhishek Khare

Gayeon Kim

Min Kim

Rohini Kumar

Niklas Lauffer

Sonali Mitra

Saket Myneni

Roshni Rawal

Jack Scelsi

Aditya Tewari

Yaswin Veluguleti

Angela Wang

Nicholas Wong

David Xiang

Ga In Yeum

Grace Yu