Senior Scott Hershberger recently found out he is a finalist in the National Merit Scholarship competition. Hershberger along with twenty-eight other students from the Wichita area were semifinalist according to The Wichita Eagle. But now Scott is a Finalist

To qualify for the National Merit Scholarship competition you need to take the PSAT your junior year and score in the top one-half of 1 percent in your state. After the PSAT you must take the SAT and score above a 214. From there you fill out an application with letters of recommendation and an essay. Once all that is out of the way you are a finalist, nationally there are about 15,000 finalists.

“I was honestly kind of expecting it because the score,” said Hershberger, “the cutoff score for semifinalist is usually about 214 and I got a 233 out of 240 and then 90% of semifinalists advance to become finalists so that didn’t come as a surprise either. Now whether or not I get an award I don’t know, they give out several thousand, $2,500 awards and then there’s some smaller ones as well so I don’t know if I’ll get any of those.

Hershberger will find out whether he won or not within the next few months.