Local students awarded National Merit Scholarships

Olympia High School recent graduate Daniel Ryckman has received a National Merit Scholarship to the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, according to aNational Merit Scholarship Corporation news release.

Brooke Devillier of Carencro.

Coluccio, who plans to study biomedical engineering, received a scholarship from Stony Brook University.

Lillian Feist of Lafayette. These students also had to have an “outstanding academic record, ” be endorsed, be recommended by a high school official and earn SAT scores that confirmed their qualifying test performance.

Madelyn Smith of Lafayette.

Bucholtz is the Salutatorian of her 2015 graduating class at Riverside High School, which is based in Painesville Township.

Over the past 60 years, more than 315,000 young men and women have won National Merit Scholarships – worth more than $1 billion. Smith plans to pursue a career in conservation. She joins more than 2,200 other college-sponsored Merit Scholar award recipients who were announced in late May.

The awards range from $500 to $2,000 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the institution financing the scholarship.

These winners were chosen by universities from the list of finalists for the National Merit Scholar program. Semifinalists were the highest-scoring program entrants in each state and represented less than one percent of the nation’s seniors.

Semifinalists were asked to write an essay and provide information about extracurricular, awards and leadership positions as part of the application process.