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Twenty-one Alachua County Public School seniors have earned prestigious semifinalist status in the 2025 National Merit Scholarship program, according to a list released this week by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, which administers the program. Fewer than 1% of current high school seniors earned that status this year.

About 1.3 million students took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test as juniors during the last school year, with 16,000 earning semifinalist status based on their performance on that exam.

All of the semi-finalists now have the opportunity to earn finalist status. In addition to earning high scores on the SAT, they will have to submit applications highlighting their other academic achievements, awards and honors earned, leadership activities, teacher recommendations and an essay.

There are five semifinalists at Buchholz High, six at Eastside High and ten at Gainesville High. They are:

Buchholz High School: Charles Austin, Andrew Caruso, Stuart Ding, Adrian Palamarev, and Emily Zhou.

Eastside High School: Aagneya Banerjee, Henry Bostock, Joyce Huang, Yihan Wang, Chloe Zheng and Kyle Ziegler.

Gainesville High School: Elizabeth Chapman, Nathan Collier, Ava Fuller, Yoo-Min Koh, Kareem Meinel, Charlotte Shea, Aiden Swallow, William Thomas, Kallum Wang, Mathilde Wuthrich.

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