Fort Bend ISD recently announced 50 students who have been chosen as semifinalists for the 2012 National Merit Scholarship program, which will award over 8,000 scholarships totaling $34 million dollars. Fort Bend ISD has one of the highest percentages of students in Texas to qualify for the semifinals.

This prestigious group of 50 students was selected from over 1.5 million other juniors in high school all across the nation. In order to qualify students must take the PSAT and have the highest scores for their state. This pool of candidates represents less that one percent of the class of 2012.

Fort Bend ISD's 2012 National Merit semifinalists by campus are: Austin High School: Zain Admani, Nicole Hill, Carolyn Levert, Christopher Long, Anna Minmier, Aditya Srivatsan, and David Zhao; Bush High School: Andy Dao Clements High School: Mathis Benjamin, Shivani Bindal, Vanessa Chen, Siddharth Desai, Abhay Divakaruni, Katherine Du, Christine Ge, Allen Hwang, Michael Jin, Nishika Karbhari, Stacey Lau, Stephanie Lin, Terry Lin, Eric Lo, Margaret Lynch, Rahul Naik, Kevin Pham, Kristen Pownell, Karishma Punjani, Sahar Sawani, Bob Shao, Anne Shen, Siddharth Sridhar, Yu-Ting Toh, Brooke Tolle, Sid Venkataraman, Vickie Wang, Scott Yarbrough and Tyler Yates; Dulles High School: Katherine Chan, Katherine Chuang, Julian Duodu, Miles Ohman, and Anh Phan. Hightower High School: Neerja Aggarwal, Anita Vasudevan, and Jane Zhu; Kempner High School: Jacob Barrios, Jordan Huynh and Meghan Kamath; and Travis High School: Sydney Hodges and Albert Zhang.