Erikson named National Merit Scholar

She’s also an AP Scholar, a designation given to students who have passed at least three AP (Advanced Placement) College Board exams. A passing grade is a 3, and she earned 4s and 5s — the top score — on her tests.

Erikson, the daughter of Doug and Susan Erikson, has maintained a perfect 4.0 gpa throughout high school, and had high scores on her SAT, earning a 2270 out of a possible 2400. That score is higher than the average for incoming freshmen at Harvard.

But she didn’t have her sights set that far east. She will be attending the highly selective Macalester College in Minnesota, where just 35 percent of applicants are accepted.

She first learned of the liberal arts school as a high school sophomore, when she worked up the courage to attend a college fair. She was so comfortable talking to the Macalester representative that she thought, “If this is the environment Macalester represented that’s where I’m interested in going.”

And it ticked off all the boxes for her. She wanted to attend a college that was small, liberal arts, academically rigorous and urban.

“I visited it and I had this moment of clarity. I really felt at home and I knew it was where I wanted to go. It was the only one I applied to, so I was glad I got in.”

As a National Merit Scholar, she will receive a yearly $2,000 scholarship at Macalester.

That, coupled with other scholarships from the school are taking the bulk of the sting out of the $50,000 price tag of tuition.

Erikson wants to work in illustration and book design.

“I’ve always loved art and I’ve always wanted to work in a field where I could be in charge of a creative process and be self-driven and self-motivated.”

She’s strong across all academic disciplines, but has a special love of writing and language arts. AP courses in history and language arts “are very directly linked and I feel that has helped me to develop multi-disciplinary skills.”

She had to write an essay as part of the application process to become a National Merit Scholar, and she talked about her work with HAVEN.

Her main extracurricular activity all through high school has been theater, and she’s part of a teen theater troupe that works with HAVEN to get the message out to teens about preventing domestic violence and sexual assault.

Her essay was about a realization she had at a HAVEN summit about the need to shift to pragmatic reality rather than focusing on noble and perhaps unachievable ideals.

“I’ve always been really fascinated with social justice and advocating for oppressed groups,” she said. Her work with HAVEN has taught her “what a big issue domestic violence and sexual assault is, even in The Dalles, and I feel it really needs to be addressed.”

The National Merit Scholar program makes a point of saying that the quality of a school cannot be judged on whether or not it produces a National Merit Scholar. As for her own education, Erikson said “my experience has definitely for the majority been very positive.” But she acknowledges a lack of resources. “I would like to be in a class that had a full set of textbooks, for one.”

She said her circle talks about the quality of education at the high school. She said she’s spent her entire high school career in advanced classes “with other students like me who have had a lot of privileges which other students have not.”

She said, “I feel like so often the conversation is framed: ‘Students aren’t trying,’ and ‘No one cares.’ But I feel you have to look deeper than that and look at the underlying issues that influence that.”

She said, “We have a lot of students from diverse backgrounds, we have a lot of really poor students, we have a lot of students who maybe don’t have time to do homework because they have two jobs.”

But just as the National Merit Scholarship recognizes individual accomplishment and achievement, apart from the school students attend, she said, “I think students can succeed anywhere and it’s all about making the best of what you have to work with.”