Five members of the Shady Side Academy Class of 2022 have been named finalists in the 67th annual National Merit Scholarship Program by the National Merit Scholarship Corp. They will compete for some 7,500 National Merit Scholarship awards worth more than $30 million, which will be offered this spring.
The SSA finalists are: Braden Crow of Irwin; Grace Greeno of Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood; Jamila Snyder of Aspinwall; Prayag Vemulapalli of Hampton Township and Anker Zhao of Indiana Township.
They are among approximately 15,000 finalists advanced out of a nationwide pool of 16,000 semifinalists chosen in September and represented the highest-scoring entrants in each state on the 2020 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. To become a finalist, semifinalists had to submit a scholarship application, have an outstanding academic record, be recommended by a school official, write an essay, and earn SAT or ACT scores confirming their qualifying test performance.
Shady Side Academy is a private school in Fox Chapel for boys and girls in grades PK-12, with optional boarding in high school.
