By James Coffey

On Wednesday, November, 17, the annual National Merit Scholarship Honoree breakfast was held at 7:30 AM in the Westborough High School cafeteria. The event is to honor the WHS students who showed academic excellence on their junior year PSAT. The breakfast is sponsored by the WHS Guidance Department as well as the Parents Advisory Committee.

The students who were recognized Wednesday were awarded either as a National Merit Scholarship Commended student or Semifinalist. Nationwide, 34,000 students were commended. This means the top 3.3% out of the 1.6 million test takers were commended. In addition, 16,000 additional students (separate from the 34,000) were awarded as NMSC Semifinalists. The top 1% nationwide, these 16,000 top students will be whittled down eventually to 7,500 National Merit Scholarship Finalist award winners in the spring of 2017.

The Class of 2017 had 22 commended students, as well as 3 students who are semifinalists. The 25 honored students, in a class of approximately 246 students, are the highest percentage of winners from a class in recent WHS history.

The NMSC Commended Students are: James Coffey, Connor Schoen, Ben Hopkinson, Pavan Narahari, Andrew Liu, Vikram Matthew, Megan O’Keefe, Grace Cheng, Tanya Walia, Pranav Sharma, Anthony Wang, Ryan Van Doren, Margaret Huibregtse, Audrey Von-Maszewski, Mara O’Hara, Ally Rota, Dhruv Ramanujan, Andrew Rosenfeld, Anjali McNeil, Will Savage, Satyendra Emani, and Brunon Stzuba.

The NMSC Semifinalists are: Keyi Li, Christina Bi, and Jean Zhang.

Congrats to all students honored for representing WHS, and good luck to the semi finalists as they continue on in the NMSC competition!