VALDOSTA — Essay winners, April Salas, Alana Hill, and Andrew Jackson took home university packages from Black Crow Media on Friday. Applicants were judged on a grading rubric for; focus and detail, organization, voice, word choice, sentence structure, grammar, mechanics, and spelling.

First place winner, Salas was awarded a $1,500 scholarship and a Windows Surface tablet with removable keyboard.

“Whenever the country was first formed there was a lot more unity, everyone worked together and as the years have progressed it has become less and less united,” Salas said, “You have all of these different fractions of the country saying ‘we should do this, we should do that’ and I touched on that, and hit some important points like immigration, the division in congress democrats and republicans, and lastly I hit on riots like the ones in Ferguson.”

Second place winner, Hill was awarded a $400 scholarship and Microsoft Word 365 University Software Package.

“I chose the ‘I too’ topic for my prompt. They asked us, ‘what can we do today to make a difference?’ It’s different from when people say, ‘oh okay, i can do this and that’ but they’re asking what can we do right now for the community, I too can do this, what can we do to further the movement and make a difference,” Hill said.

Third place winner, Jackson was awarded Microsoft Word 365 University Software Package. Jackson wrote on a topic based around Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

“In the essay I talked about how I have a dream kind of similar to Martin Luther King’s and how he said, ‘we have to come together, we have to work hard.’ Honestly, in our future generations if we don’t begin to work now we are not going to have a future because the economy is going down and all these other different factors,” Jackson said. “I said it starts with our central political world, if we could align those people and get them to stop fighting over everything, you know kind of get them as of one entity we can progress from there and create jobs, and do all of the things that makes our country better and that we need to do to make our country better.”