75 Cobb County seniors named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists

Some Cobb County seniors have good reason to update their resumes.

The school district announced that 75 students have been named semifinalists for the 2017 National Merit Scholarship.

That's a more than 30-percent increase compared to last year's 56 students. Nationwide, there were about 16,000 semifinalists in the 62nd annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

"The nationwide pool of semifinalists represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors," the district said.

» See which students were honored from Fulton and Gwinnett counties.

The seniors will go on to compete for about 7,500 scholarships worth about $33 million that will be offered next spring. Of those, about 90 percent of the semifinalists are expected to become finalists and about half of the finalists will win a scholarship.

About 1.6 million juniors in more than 22,000 high schools entered by taking the 2015 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.

See who was recognized from Cobb County below:

Allatoona High School                            

• William A. Smith

Harrison High School

• Thomas V. Perkins

Kennesaw Mountain High School

• Madelyn R. Focaracci
• Auburn Ford
• Connor A. Truono

Lassiter High School

• Kelsey R. Archer
• Christopher J. Freel
• Marjorie A. Hutcherson
• Olivia M. Marenda
• Amanda K. Miller
• Grace A. Naqi
• Rachael L. Rankin

Pope High School

• Matthew E. Anderson
• Alex P. Erdman
• Alexander J. Reedy
• Andrew R. Thomas
• Quinn S. Wyner

Walton High School

• Anthony D. Bernard
• Maxwell S. Burrows
• Annie Chen
• Donian I. Chyong
• Christopher G. Daker
• Ellen K. Dobo
• Julia A. Edmunds
• Sophia G. Foppa
• Abigail V. Fortier
• Ryan C. Heinrichs
• Michael Y. Hu
• Jason M. Judge
• Trey D. Jurgens
• Piyush G. Kancharlawar
• Sindhu N. Kannappan
• Sabrina Kaplan
• Dylan K. Kim
• Carl Liu
• Vera Lu
• Samantha L. McClendon
• Julianna L. McNeice
• Bianca Mers
• Aurian O. Naderi
• Abhi Nathan
• Samuel Patterson
• Aashka J. Sheth
• Emily K. Surry
• Jackson A. Thompson
• Sarah Y. Tsai
• Ralueke Vandenhoudt
• Lucy S. Wang
• Nathan S. Wu
• Patrick L. Wu
• Kaylen T. Xie
• Jumshaid Yamin
• Allen Zhang
• Bryan Zhang
• Kevin Zhang
• Maxwell Zhou

Hillgrove High School

• Destini J. Deinde-Smith
• Nathan Hill

McEachern High School

• William S. Adair

Campbell High School

• Benjamin Davidson
• Ben P. Kilpatrick
• Michael S. Peng
• Karan A. Pol

Wheeler High School