Three students from the Lexington school districts have been named semifinalists for the highly competitive 2025 Coca-Cola Scholars Program.

Gabrielle Goodwin, a senior at Senior Hill High, and Josh Gardner and Raghav Pallapothu, both seniors at River Bluff High, are among the 1,3336 students nationally selected for this scholarship.

The Coca-Cola Scholars Program, created by the Coca-Cola Company in 1986, acknowledges high school seniors who display academic excellence, leadership and a commitment to making a positive impact in their communities and around the world.  

Each year, the program awards $20,000 scholarships to 150 students and supports more than 1,400 college students.

This year, 105,000 students across the country applied for the scholarship, and just 1.27% of them (1,336 students) earned semifinalist status. Through the selection process, students are selected based on their academic excellence, leadership and service exhibited in school and community activities.

The next step in this process will narrow down even further, with 250 semifinalists advancing to the Regional Finalist round.

"I am honored to be named a semifinalist for this distinguished scholarship and to be among this group of amazing students and people,” Gabrielle Goodwin said in a press release. “This is not only an outstanding opportunity financially, but the opportunity to be a member of the worldwide Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation community is even more rewarding. I am excited to move forward in this application process!”

Gabrielle, who plans to study business analytics and statistics, is currently applying to 10 universities across the United States.

The top five colleges that Coca-Cola scholars attend are Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Yale and Princeton with the top career paths being business and finance, education, healthcare, arts, entertainment and sports and law.

The Coca-Cola Scholars Program also offers a podcast, "The Sip," short for the Coke scholars ignite podcast. Here, former and current Coca-Cola scholars share stories on their service around the world and uplift one another, celebrating their impact.

To be eligible for the Coca-Cola Scholars Program, applicants must be currently enrolled in a high school or home-schooled, attending school in one of the 50 states, the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico.

Applicants must also be either a U.S. citizen, U.S. nationals, U.S. permanent resident, refugee, asylees, Cuban Haitian entrants or Humanitarian Parolees.  Students must also be expecting to receive a high school diploma during the current academic year, planning to pursue a degree at an accredited U.S. post-secondary institution and able to verify a minimum overall B/3.0 GPA in high school work.