Miss Missouri wins Miss America writing competition for DSU scholarship

The Miss America Organization and The Miss America Foundation have announced the 2020 scholarship award winner for The Dakota State University and Beacom College of Computer and Cyber Sciences STEM Scholarship. The winner is Miss Missouri, Simone Esters.

Esters will receive an unrestricted cash award of five-thousand dollars, and the ability to enroll at Dakota State for either an undergraduate degree, or a post-graduate degree, for a total scholarship value that could exceed 85-thousand dollars.

The 51 candidates were asked to write a blog, tweet, and an Instagram post in answer to a question regarding what they think is the greatest technological threat to our safety and security and what should be done about it.  Esters focused on social engineering, writing “We need to re-engineer our minds to outsmart the social engineers who are endangering our safety and security.”

Esters is a journalism student at the University of Missouri, and she wrote on her Facebook page about the honor, saying she was thrilled and grateful to have been chosen.