Nathan Yu has the distinction of being named a National Merit Scholarship finalist, one of 15,000 in the country.
Yu, a resident of Belle Mead, is a senior at The Hun School of Princeton. Yu is the only one this year from the school to receive this honor.
“I found out about being a finalist a month ago. I found myself pretty pumped and it is just great to be a finalist,” he said.
According to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, the National Merit Scholarship Program is an academic competition for recognition and scholarships that began in 1955. High school students enter the National Merit Program by taking the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.
Yu became a finalist by scoring in the top one percent of 1.6 million juniors in the country who took the PSAT in the fall of 2017.
He would go on to submit an application, transcript and recommendations, after which he was chosen as a finalist. He is now being considered for one of 7,500 National Merit scholarships up for grabs, which he said will be announced in the spring in the next couple months.
He said timing helped play a part in his successful test score.
“A couple weeks leading up to the PSATs I was doing several practice tests to prepare for the actual SATs, and it was convenient timing that the PSATs were happening at that time,” Yu said.
Yu has been at the Hun School since his freshman year of high school. He has not decided on where he will go to college yet.
“I believe I will study the arts and sciences, but I will know what I will study once I decide on the college I will go to,” he said.
He said being a finalist is validating the hard work he put in get the high scores.
“I did work for it. I also feel a lot of it is luck that my actual SATs and PSATs so closely coincided with each other as I was studying. It is just really cool to be a finalist,” Yu said.
