The National Merit Scholarship Corporation awarded 27 Fairfax County Public students $2,500 scholarships in the 69th annual National Merit Scholarship Program. The Fairfax County Public School winners are among 770 high school seniors who received corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarships. Over 1.3 million juniors in about 21,000 high schools entered the 2024 National Merit Scholarship Program by taking the 2022 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants according to a release by theNational Merit Scholarship Corporation. “Each scholarship winner was evaluated on his or her academic record, including difficulty level of subjects studied and grades earned; scores from two standardized tests; contributions and leadership in school and community activities; a personal essay; and a recommendation from a high school official,” stated FCPS.
The winning students with their probable career fields in parentheses, are: Chantilly HS: Leona Eunbi Kim (law), Siddhi Surawkar (medicine), and Jason Yoo (investment banking); Fairfax HS:Maya Kamat (medicine); Madison HS: Shivashish Das (medicine); McLean HS: Maya Pashai (veterinary medicine) and Clara Marks (mechanical engineering); Oakton HS: Aditi Bhattacharjya (law) and Nicole Deng (astrophysics); Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology: Cameron Ake (computer programming), Jacob Bowen-Glazeroff (law), Lakshmi Sritan Motati (computer science), Paul Hwang (aerospace engineering), Cierra Min (biomedical engineering), Benjamin Daniil Cohen (neurosurgery), Dylan Cheng (software engineering), Pranav Elavarthi (computer science),and Mihir Kulshreshtha (finance); Emi Zhang (computer science), Ayaan Siddiqui (software engineering), Aiden Cheong (mechanical engineering - robotics), Tristan Devictor (politics), Ronit Kapur (astrophysics), Grace Oh (medicine), Alexander O’Quinn (biomedical engineering), and Sebastian Emin Toro (computer engineering; and West Potomac HS: Lucy Marshall (law).