MACOMB (WGEM) – Every year, over 1 million high schoolers from across the U.S. enter the lengthy process in applying for a National Merit Scholarship, but only a few thousand actually receive an award.
Macomb High School senior Corda Adkins-Covert learned this month that she could be one of the 5,000-plus students to be awarded.
”I’m really excited for the opportunity to get a scholarship, and then also it’ll be a great thing to put on other applications,” Adkins-Covert said.
The success of an applicant is based on test taking. Applicants must submit their SAT scores they took for high school while also completing a Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.
According to Macomb school officials, Adkins-Covert finished in the top 1% nationwide.
Adkins-Covert hopes to win a scholarship so it can help her pursue an engineering degree. Before entering high school, she was involved in the FIRST LEGO League, where she built LEGO robots.
As a junior, she took advanced placement (AP) calculus.
Adkins-Covert has since applied and been accepted to Iowa State University, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Purdue University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
She also applied to Carnegie Mellon University and the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but has not heard back.
Her math teacher, Karen Morgan, describes the senior as both brilliant and down to earth.
“She’s in it to learn,” Morgan said. “So many students like ‘what do I need to do to get a A,’ and she’s just in it because she wants to learn.”
Morgan said Adkins-Covert has the unique ability to explain math problems rather than just solving them.
“I would joke, like if she raised her hand in class, I always assumed not that she didn’t understand something, it was that, ope, I clearly had made a mistake,” Morgan said. “There were times when I checked over her work and I was like ‘hers could have been the answer key.’”
If accepted to M.I.T., Morgan believes Adkins-Covert would be the first student she’s had in class to do so.
”For any advice for other people, if you’re worried about whether or not you can do something, just go for it,” Adkins-Covert said. “It might lead to much better opportunities than you thought.”
The 2025 graduate will find out between April and July if she’ll receive a National Merit Scholarship.
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