One hundred and seven MVLA and PAUSD seniors from the Class of 2025 have advanced as semifinalists in the National Merit Scholarship Program. Of the 107, 37 are students at Gunn High School, 16 go to Los Altos High School, 27 attend Mountain View High School and 27 go to Palo Alto High School.

This competitive scholarship named roughly 16,000 high school students, or around 1% of US seniors in the Class of 2025, as semifinalists. Awarded for their academic performance, the semifinalists were selected based on their scores in the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test last fall.

Approximately 95% of the semifinalists are expected to advance to become finalists, a standing that requires an application providing academic records, community participation details, awards, a letter of recommendation and SAT or ACT scores, among other things.

Finalists will compete for $2,500 scholarships from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation and merit scholarship awards provided by other organizations and academic institutions. Scholarships will be announced in spring 2025.

The MVLA semifinalists are:

• Devansh Agarwal
• Dhruv Aron
• Noam Avrahami
• Piper Chatwin
• Sarah Chung
• David Feldman
• Kaihon Hui
• Audrey Jamieson
• Oscar Johnson
• Sophie Li
• Timothy Lin
• Kaden Ma
• Theodore Peter
• Benjamin Samek
• Joshua Tang
• Michael Xu