The National Merit Process: Months in the Making

The National Merit banner at the front entrance of the STJ campus.

My sister, Emilee, a sophomore at STJ, and my family have been very supportive during this process.

by: Will Alexander, senior

Every school year during the fall, it comes time to take the PSAT, and every year, grades 9 through 11 dread the thought of taking another four-hour standardized test. But for the juniors, those four hours have the potential to mean a lot more. When I was a junior, I knew that the PSAT was used to determine National Merit Semifinalists, but I didn’t really conceive just how big that was. After a long four hours of what felt like mind numbing testing, I walked out of the room thinking I was done with Pre-SAT forever and that was it. But to my surprise, the fall of this school year I got called into my counselor, Mr. Clinton's, office one random day. While a lot of different possibilities of why I was in there ran around in my head, not all good either, he told me I had done well enough to be a National Merit Semifinalist. With a bunch of excitement and joy, I went home that night with a letter explaining how the whole process would work from there on. After they calmed down and were able to collect their breath, my parents helped me to finish getting an application together for the next step. I had to get letters of recommendation, ACT/SAT scores, my transcript, and a bunch of other information together in order to be a candidate for National Merit Finalist. I turned in my forms, listed my expected college information, and waited. And waited. And waited. The banners and praise were very gratifying, but those months between Semifinalist and Finalist announcement felt like forever. I went from not even thinking about National Merit to it consuming my thoughts everyday all the way to one February day. In the middle of lunch, Mrs. Poplin called me up onto the stage and in that moment it felt surreal. Many colleges offer some smaller scholarships for being a Semifinalist. But being a Finalist, that’s where things really ramp up. Just like that it felt gratifying and relieving to know the whole college admission process just became that much less stressful. Now as graduation nears and I get ready to go to Auburn for my next four years, I look back on the whole National Merit Process and smile, knowing how exciting, nerve racking, and incredible it was, and just how important it is, even if it doesn’t seem like it when you’re taking the PSAT. #wearesaintjamesschool