Marine Corps Base Quantico -- Quantico Middle/High School senior Emily was recently selected as a commended student in the National Merit Scholarship Program. According to QMHS principal Michael Johnson, Emily is the first commended student for QMHS in at least the last eight years.

The 17-year-old base resident earned the honor for her exceptionally high score on the PSAT taken in her junior year. Emily scored 201 out of 240 possible points. Only about 34,000 of the more than 1.5 million test takers are recognized as commended students each year, according to nationalmerit.org. A smaller number are further recognized as semi-finalists, finalists, and scholarship winners.

Highly active in the QMHS community, Emily is a member of the Junior ROTC program and the president of the QMHS chapter of the National Honor Society. Despite her participation in Junior ROTC, Emily does not want to follow her father, Marine Brig. Gen. Russell Sanborn into the military; she wants to be an elementary school teacher.

“I have a passion for teaching and working with young children,” Emily said. She currently volunteers at her church two Sundays per month, working in the nursery and helping teach Sunday school to preschoolers. As the National Honor Society president, she is working to create a peer-to-peer tutoring program at QMHS, where gifted students would be paired with students who need extra help with a particular subject.

Emily is also a member of the QMHS girls’ volleyball team and helped lead the team to its first conference championship on Oct. 30. She plays soccer in the spring, and piano and violin in her spare time.

Emily credits her sophomore English teacher, Carol Zank-Rehwalt, with helping her find her voice in writing. “She was a hard grader,” Emily said, “but I learned so much from her.”

Though Emily has submitted applications to a couple colleges already, she is still investigating her options and trying to decide where she wants to go.