OCR Text |
Show UCAS Student Wins Women's Issues Essay Contest at UVU . ' J 1 $ i Shelby Jorgensen of Pleasant Pleas-ant Grove never thought she'd win the high school essay competition, com-petition, a new event added this year to the International Women Wom-en of the Mountains Conference Confer-ence held at Utah Valley University Uni-versity March 8 and 9. Shelby was awarded $500 which she admitted will be mostly used for gas to get her to UCAS every ev-ery day. Representing six schools across the Wasatch Front, 54 students submitted essays on the topics of women and children's chil-dren's health, education, family fam-ily and gender issues, human trafficking and exploitation and women as leaders. Twelve finalists presented their essays in a workshop at the Orem Public Library on March 7. Shelby, a junior at the Utah County Academy of Sciences Sci-ences (UCAS), won first prize for her essay "Women's Education Educa-tion in Mountainous Regions." Some essays dealt with human hu-man trafficking throughout the world, a subject also addressed at conference this week. The students discussed how young women are recruited from rural areas, and then transported to foreign countries, where they are at the mercy of the traffickers. traffick-ers. Other essays, like Shelby's winning work, described how education truly is the answer for women in these rural and developing areas - how much their lives improve through education, ed-ucation, and the empowerment the)' have to then change their home situation. Shelby Jorgensen. To illustrate her findings, Shelby divided the Orem Public Library audience into segments, according to research on the living conditions of people in Third World countries. Based "UCAS" continued on Page 5 "UCAS" continued from Page 4 on those categories, she illustrated illus-trated the life of each audience member. Shelby then described how nearly a billion people are not able to read or sign their name, and that two-thirds of them are women. Most of these women have little hope of access ac-cess to education because of their culture, or the treacherous rural areas they reside in. The essays were judged by Keith Snedegar, a UVU history his-tory professor, and Connie Lamb, BYU social sciences librarian, on the students' writing quality, their use of source material and their oral PowerPoint presentations. "We chose the papers that best addressed the theme of the conference," said Snedegar. "Shelby did just an outstanding job." Shelby stated, "I got to meet seven ambassadors from around the world who were promoting promot-ing their country's issues. That was really cool to meet people like that." She added, "I real-. real-. ized how much I didn't value my education." She continued, "At first when I had to write the paper pa-per I was kind of mad because I thought it would take forever to write this five page paper when I could be watching TV or face-booking face-booking or something. But then I realized, at the end, how blessed I was even to be able to write a paper, especially me because I get to go to an early college high school and get a college education. educa-tion. I just realized that I was pretty lucky to get an' education and I should probably go out and do something with it," she concluded. con-cluded. Shelby is considering pursuing pur-suing a career in engineering because she'd like to help people around the world by using engineering engi-neering solutions. But for now, she is happy at UCAS, an early college high school that is located lo-cated on UVU's Orem Campus. Many UCAS students, including Shelby, participate in a concurrent concur-rent enrollment program by simultaneously si-multaneously taking courses at UVU with the goal of graduating from high school with an Associate's Associ-ate's Degree. |