Recently, Rockwood released the names of students from each high school who qualified for National Merit scholarships. From Lafayette, this includes:

Alicja Blaszczyk, Rohan Bohra, Patricia Denn, Eileen Kosola, Joseph Lu, Jakob Molskness, Shruti Natarajan, Nassim Oufattole, Prathishtha Pitchyaiah, Lina Qi, Rithik Reddy, Nathan Reed, Anna Samsonov, Atul Srinivasan and Nicole Tang.

Lafayette has 15 qualifying students, Rockwood Summit has four, Eureka has eight and Marquette has 13 for a total of 40 Rockwood students being eligible for these scholarships.

Students earn these scholarships by scoring exceptionally well on their SAT. It is also required that the student takes a Practice SAT (PSAT) prior to completing the actual test.

Bohra, senior, took several practice tests in order to get into the testing mood.

“I probably took about two to four full tests over the course of a few weeks. Afterwards, I just used a whole slew of books and went through the answers to figure out why I got some answers wrong,” Bohra said.

Due to this intense preparation, Bohra earned a high score on his SAT, and therefore won a National Merit scholarship.

The organization in charge of these scholarships is the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC). In general, they have goals to reward talented students, encourage academic excellence and to gain support from organizations willing to sponsor these scholarships.