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HILLSBOROUGH: Raghavan, Wang win $2,500 National Merit Scholarships

   Two Hillsborough High School seniors will receive $2,500 scholarships from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation.
   They were chosen from a talent pool of more than 15,000 finalists in the 2012 National Merit Scholarship Program.
   One awardee is Che “Simon” Wang. He will attend Rutgers University’s College of Arts and Science on a full scholarship. He intends to major in biology and statistics.
   In high school, he’s been on the math team, in the school musical, and played percussion in the marching band and concert piano for the chorale and choir.
   The other winner is Shreehari Raghavan, who will attend the University of Pennsylvania and plans to get a dual degree in economics and computer science, with a minor in acturial mathematics.
   His primary in-school activity was debate (Model Congress and Model United Nations). He has won awards in conferences at Duke, Penn, Rutgers and Princeton universities.
   Out of school, his interest is in Indian classical music. He wrote his scholarship essay on Carnatic music and has performed at the Cleveland Aradhana, the most prestigious Carnatic contest in the U.S., he said.
   He is also the USA director of an organization that raises funds to help feed, clothe and provide educational materials to village children in India.
   The $2,500 awards come from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation’s own funds.
   On April 18, about 1,000 recipients, including Sarah Wilson of Hillsborough, of corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards were named. College-sponsored Merit Scholarship winners will be announced May 23.
   ’’Competition for the scholarships began in October 2010 when about 1.5 million juniors nationwide took the qualifying test.
   Last fall, the highest-scoring participants in each state, representing less than one percent of the nation’s high school seniors, were named semifinalists.
   From that group, 15,000 students met the high academic standards and other requirements to advance to the finalist level.