In a school district renown for its rigor, nearly 50 Montgomery County seniors set the bar even higher this year by earning some of the most prestigious awards in the nation for academic prowess.
Three seniors, two from Silver Spring’s Montgomery Blair and one from Rockville’s Richard Montgomery, won the title of Presidential Scholar, awarded recently by the U.S. Department of Education to 139 students throughout the nation for exceptional performance on college entrance exams on top of further achievements.
Like a typical teen, Richard Montgomery’s Benjamin Lu found getting out of bed in the morning exceedingly challenging.
Instead of pressing snooze, however, Lu contacted psychologist Mortimer Mishkin at Bethesda’s National Institute of Health and set up experiments gauging the effect of early waking on memory functions.
“Myresults were that it affected certain types of memory more than others,” Lu said before casually explaining obscure brain functions.
He added if nothing else, his results “should pressure the school board to change the hours of school.”
Julie Zhu and Christina Zou join Lu to make Montgomery Blair one of only eight schools in the nation to produce more than one Presidential Scholar.
Zhu is one of only two students in the country — and in recent memory, according to a spokesman for the Department of Education — to win the award for both of its categories: academics and the arts.
“I think I’m a science person, but leaning toward math, but I can’t really pick one,” said Yale University-bound Zhu. She is also a nationally competitive volleyball player, a portrait artist and a self-described “colorist.”
“I love color; I see color everywhere and perhaps they’re exaggerated,” Zhu said. “Each artist has his or her own touch.”
Lu, Zhu and Zou were three of 20 Montgomery County students eligible for the honor based solely on test scores. The district’s contingent made up more than one-third of the candidates from the state.
Another 37 Montgomery County students, again more than a third of the state’s total and among only 800 throughout the country, were chosen to receive prestigious National Merit Scholarships based on standardized test scores and academic accomplishments.
