On Sept. 11, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) announced that 55 Harker seniors have been named semifinalists in the 2014 National Merit Scholarship Program. This is the second-highest number of semifinalists from Harker since the school began participating during the 2004-05 school year.

The students, listed in alphabetical order by last name, are:

Aditya Batra, Adarsh Battu, Vikas Bhetanabhotla, Kilian Burke, Shivani Chandrashekaran, Allen Chen, Rebecca Chen, Stephanie Chen, Meena Chetty, Zareen Choudhury, Albert Chu, Jennifer Dai, Kevin Duraiswamy, Shenel Ekici-Moling, Christopher Fu, Nikkan Ghosh, Apurva Gorti, Katie Gu, Divyahans Gupta, Helena Huang, Benjamin Huchley, Shazdeh Hussain, Saachi Jain, Gaurav Kumar, Monica Kumaran, Connie Li, Emily Lin, Mabel Luo, Angela Ma, Kimberly Ma, Maya Madhavan, Richard Min, Sreyas Misra, Varun Mohan, Nishaant Murali, Vikram Naidu, Anisha Padwekar, Daniel Pak, Zoe Papakipos, Alexander Pei, Preethi Periyakoil, Megan Prakash, Namita Ravi, Isaac Rothschild, Arthur Shau, Rahul Sridhar, Vikram Sundar, Brian Tuan, Leslie Tzeng, Nihal Uppugunduri, Sachin Vadodaria, Brandon Yang, Albert Zhao, Andrew Zhu and Kevin Zhu.

About 1.5 million students are entered into this contest every year by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Qualifying Test as grade 11 students. Approximately 16,000 of these students are named semifinalists, and are required to maintain an exemplary academic record, receive an endorsement from a school official, submit an essay and receive SAT scores consistent with their scores on the PSAT/NMSQT in order to become finalists.