21 Birmingham, Beverly Hills Students Named National Merit Semifinalists

Last week, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation released the names of the 16,000 National Merit Semifinalists — 21 of which go to Birmingham and Beverly Hills-area high schools.

These high school seniors now have the opportunity to compete for 8,300 National Merit Scholarships worth more than $32 million next spring. Around 90 percent of semifinalists attain finalist standing and more than half of the finalists will win a National Merit Scholarship.

According to a press release from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, semifinalists must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official, write an essay and earn SAT scores that confirm the student's earlier performance on the Preliminary SAT (PSAT).

Around 1.5 million high school juniors in more than 22,000 high schools entered the 2012 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the PSAT. The nationwide pool of semifinalists includes the highest-scoring entrants in each state.

Check out the Birmingham and Beverly Hills-area students named National Merit seminfinalists:

Groves High School

• Kelly Greer
• Christina Pastoria
• Rachael Stein
• Robert Swor

Seaholm High School

• Anna Collins
• Kimberly Lakocy

Roeper Upper School

• Zoe Demko
• Justin Finkel
• Garrett House
• Mikayla Konst
• Brooke Michelson
• Julia Pudar

Detroit Country Day

• Apostolos Apostolou
• Nicholas Baran
• Richa Bijani
• Sidharth Chand
• Brenton Desai
• Siddhant Dogra
• Hari Iyer
• Isaac Kapadia
• Pranav Khambete
• Ari Korotkin
• Alexander Kucy
• Oliver Lake
• Anna Latos
• Nikhil Misra
• Kenneth Ozdowy
• Anusha Ponduri
• Luna Shen
• Shefali Sood
• Anneke Von Seeger
• Carolyn Xue
• Kathy Young