Wilmington's Hayduk Wins Corporate National Merit Scholarship

WILMINGTON, MA — Elisabeth M. Hayduk, a senior at Wilmington High School, has been chosen as a winner of a corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship award, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) announced Wednesday.

Hayduk's scholarship — the National Merit Pfizer Inc. Scholarship —will be financed by Pfizer, the global biopharmaceutical company.

According to the NMSC, Hayduk had reached the finalist level of the National Merit Scholarship competition and met Pfizer's criteria for its scholarship recipients.

For the program, corporate sponsors, like Pfizer, provide scholarships for students who are children of their employees, or are residents of communities the company serves, or, perhaps, are planning to pursue college majors or careers the sponsor wishes to encourage.

Pfizer has not revealed the exact dollar figure of the grant. But the NMSC said most of the corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship awards are renewable for up to four years of college undergraduate study and provide annual stipends that range from $1,000 to $10,000 per year.

Some corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship awards provide a single payment between $2,500 and $5,000, the NMSC said.

Recipients can use their awards at any regionally accredited U.S. college or university of their choice.

According to the NMSC, approximately 840 high school seniors earned corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship awards this year, which were financed by about 107 corporations, company foundations and other business organizations.

The current recipients of these grants entered the 2023 National Merit Scholarship Program as high school juniors when they took the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test in 2021.

Last September, 16,000 semifinalists were selected based on their scores on the qualifying test.

In order to advance to the finalist stage, each semifinalist had to complete a detailed scholarship application, which included writing an essay and providing information about extracurricular activities, awards and leadership positions.

Semifinalists also had to have an outstanding academic record, be endorsed and recommended by a high school official and earn SAT or ACT scores that confirmed their qualifying test performance.

The NMSC said that over 15,000 students were selected as finalists. From that pool, more than 7,140 students will be chosen to receive National Merit Scholarships totaling nearly $28 million, according to the NMSC.

The corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship award recipients announced on Wednesday represented just the first group of National Merit Scholarship winners.

On May 10, the NMSC will name the recipients of the National Merit $2,500 Scholarships. On July 7 and July 10, the winners of the college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards will be announced.