Sixty-five LWSD students named National Merit Finalists

Redmond, Wash. – Congratulations to Lake Washington School District’s 65 seniors who were recently named National Merit finalists. These students are among the 15,000 students from across the country now being considered for a number of National Merit scholarships. These high school seniors have an opportunity to continue in the competition for nearly 6,870 National Merit Scholarships, worth nearly $26 million that will be offered in the spring. 

High school students entered the 2025 National Merit Scholarship Program, its 70th annual, by taking the 2023 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which served as an initial screen of program entrants.

Three types of National Merit Scholarships will be offered in the spring of 2025. Every Finalist will compete for one of 2,500 National Merit® $2500 Scholarships that will be awarded on a state-representational basis. About 770 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards will be provided by approximately 130 corporations and business organizations for Finalists who meet their specified criteria. In addition, about 150 colleges and universities are expected to finance some 3,600 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for Finalists who will attend the sponsor institution. National Merit Scholarship winners of 2025 will be announced beginning in April and concluding in July. These scholarship recipients will join more than 382,000 other distinguished young people who have earned the Merit Scholar title.

To learn more, visit National Merit Scholarship Corporation’s website.

Lake Washington School District National Merit Finalists*:

Eastlake High School

• Sambriddhi Adhikari     
• Vaishnavi Annamraju    
• Arin Barde
• Colin Cajigas     
• Tiana Chi            
• Christopher Dickman
• Daniel Gorbatov              
• Elliot Lee Kaiser
• Yixin Li
• Marvin Lin         
• Shriya Narayan
• Manya Pradeep Narayan
• Ananya Prakash               
• Alon Ragoler     
• Dhaya Vidya Sarathy
• Sneha Sharma  
• Maanav Sikaria
• Hongning Wang
• Chujia Yang        

Redmond High School

• Ananya Bezbaruah
• Varnika Bhargava
• Abigail N. Goheen
• Joyce Huang
• Krishna Iyer
• Mimi Leung
• Yuwan Luo
• Noel Prince Muthuplakal
• Arya Nagvekar
• Aparajitha Sethuraman
• Maxwell Shi
• Ramya Suresh
• Tian Ci Nathaniel Tok

International Community School

• Angelina Yu
• Jasmine Zhen

Tesla STEM High School

• Achintya Agrawal
• Rajiv Arvind
• Bhanu V. Atmakuri
• Saharsh Bhargava
• Ryan Chung
• Keshav G. Iyer
• Elizabeth K. James
• Pranav Kannepalli
• Aishika Koppolu
• Keying Li
• Sarthak Lodha
• Reese Long
• Nicole N. Mihaylova
• Megha Ramachandran
• Sacchin Saravanan
• Rohit Sundaram
• Kaavya Trivedi
• Anisha Vaish
• Edison A. Wheeler
• Shuhui Yang
• Marilyn R. Zhao

Lake Washington High School

• Rachel Kelley
• Ashwika Mattam
• Zachary Lee McKay
• Robert Michailov
• Sakshi Verma

Juanita High School

• Sri Sai Meenakshi Arasada
• Zara Dobrev
• Cate S. Harrington
• Thomas Longcore
• Wenjuan Zou

* Note: Photos available on request.

###

About Lake Washington: Lake Washington School District is a high-performing public school district serving Kirkland Redmond and Sammamish Washington. It is the second largest district in the state of Washington with over 30,000 students in 55 schools.