The semi-finalists for the 2023 National Merit Scholarship Program have been selected and among them were two Big Reds, seniors Rohan Malik-Hamirani and Nelson Woofter. Out of the 2 million students who took the PSAT in 2021, 16,000 of them were named as semi-finalists. This puts Malik-Hamirani and Woofter in the top 0.8% of students across the country.

“When you look at past years’ scores in West Virginia, I was expecting to qualify based on the score I had because it was higher than that. (To prepare) I went to Khan Academy and did a lot of their stuff, basically all of it, and I took their practice tests,” said Malik-Hamirani.

Seven thousand five hundred students will be picked as the final recipients of the scholarship, and they will be announced from March to June. In order to qualify for the scholarship, participants had to sign up for the PSAT while in the correct year (it’s mostly for juniors in the fall of their third year), be enrolled in high school and planning to enroll in college the following fall after they graduate, and attend high school in the United States or a United States territory.

“It is very exciting,” said Woofter. “It opens up a lot of opportunities for me to attend college at a very low cost. It is nice to see my hard work pay off.”