Local students are semifinalists for National Merit Scholarships

Officials recently announced the names of about 16,000 semifinalists in the 52nd annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

To become a finalist, a semifinalist must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, be endorsed and recommended by the school principal and earn SAT scores that confirm the student's earlier qualifying test performance.

All Merit Scholarship winners will be chosen from the group of finalists.The following are local semifinalists:

Agoura Hills High School: Mihir Bawal, Sarah Caffey, Daniel French, Rufung Lin, Sarah Nagy and Michael Samuels.

Calabasas High School: Devin Banerjee, Kristen Cyffka, Derrick Hang, Derek Ju, Abraar Karan, Hallie Kutak, Michael Liu, David Shim and Ryan Shumacher.

Viewpoint School: Nitin Bajaj, Veer Bawa, William Blackman, Tristan Brown, Jacob Combs, Sean Denny, Joseph Golden, Patrick Saris, Sarah Schechter and Alexander Shams.

Newbury Park High School: Judy Chen, Colin Dwyer, Jessica Fujimoto and Michael Manos.

Oak Park High School: Michael Ma and Lisa Rotenstein.

Thousand Oaks High School: Brian Belleville, Rosa Deng, David Gulbransen, Jason Lin, Christine Liu, Jason Loose, Yang Xia and Hank Yan.

Westlake Village High School: Kevin Critchlow, Joshua Esquivel, Kirit Karkare, Maxwell Lee, Jamie Li, Yihan Li, Chelsea Ma, Juan Rodrigo Ricafort, Tiffany Russell and Peter Vorissis.