Senior Will White has been named a National Merit Scholar and is the winner of a $2,500 National Merit Scholarship. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) made the announcement.
The 2,500 National Merit Scholar designees were selected from more than 15,000 outstanding Finalists in the 2016 National Merit Scholarship Program. HPA seniors Tristan Kilkenny and Jordan Virtue also were named Finalists in this yearʻs competition.
White, the son of John and Laurie White of Kamuela, has been a very active member of the HPA community. In addition to serving as student council president and dorm prefect, White was a member of the boys basketball team and co-published an article about Hawaiʻi Island coqui frogs in The Washington Postʻs Morning Mix during his internship with Morning Mix founder and editor Fred Barbash. He is an accomplished musician and a self-taught, award-winning banjo player, who also plays piano, guitar, and ukulele. White will attend Stanford University this fall and plans to study product design through the College of Engineering.
National Merit $2,500 scholarship winners are the Finalists in each state judged to have the strongest combination of accomplishments, skills, and potential for success in rigorous college studies. The number of winners named in each state is proportional to the state's percentage of the nation's graduating high school seniors.
These Scholars were selected by a committee of college admissions officers and high school counselors, who appraised a substantial amount of information submitted by both the Finalists and their high schools: the academic record, including difficulty level of subjects studied and grades earned; scores from two standardized tests; contributions and leadership in school and community activities; an essay written by the Finalist; and a recommendation written by a high school official.
This year's competition for National Merit Scholarships began in October 2014 when more than 1.5 million juniors in about 22,000 high schools took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants. Last fall, the highest-scoring participants in each state, representing less than one percent of the nation's high school seniors, were named Semifinalists on a state-representational basis. Only these 16,000 Semifinalists had an opportunity to continue in the competition.
From the Semifinalist group, 15,000 students met the very high academic standards and other requirements to advance to the Finalist level of the competition. By the conclusion of the 2016 program, about 7,500 Finalists will have earned the "Merit Scholar" title and received a total of about $33 million in college scholarships.
NMSC, a not-for-profit corporation that operates without government assistance, was founded in 1955 specifically to conduct the National Merit Scholarship Program. The majority of scholarships offered each year are underwritten by about 440 independent corporate and college sponsors that share NMSC's goals of honoring scholastically talented youth and encouraging academic excellence at all levels of education.
