Former Miss South Carolina and Wharton MBA student Ashley Wood is in pickle. See, in 2004 she won around $20,000 in scholarship money from the Miss America organization, and she’s yet to receive any of it.

Apparently, the “purpose” of Miss America is actually to grant scholarships. Who knew? Here I thought it was just to show a little t & a and give Mario Lopez aka AC Slater some camera-time. God knows we’ve missed those dimples.

Contest officials for Miss South Carolina claim that Wood failed to follow the stated guidelines for receiving her scholarship money, and that Wood was required to read these guidelines four times.

Perhaps there’s something wrong about giving scholarships to people you think have to read something four times before they comprehend it. Maybe next year they should just ask the winners to copy the rules out in crayon.

Woods herself says that she applied for an extension but never received a response. “They are supposedly a scholarship organization, so it seems to me like if they had local directors who are not filling their obligations, they would either step in and make them pay it, or bypass that and just go ahead and give me the state scholarship,” said Woods.

I’m not a genius, but I generally begin to question the legitimacy of a scholarship organization as soon as they me to put on a bathing suit. I wonder how far it would have gone before Wood started having second thoughts about the situation. Maybe Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill was just another confused scholarship applicant. “Alright, we’re going to need your SAT scores, transcript, and then if you could yell ‘it puts the lotion on its skin’ while pretending you’re a woman that’d be great. Have you considered what you’re going to do for the talent portion?”

All joking aside, I’m sure Ms. Woods has a legitimate case against the Miss America organization. Well, I’m not really sure of it; I’m just going to side with her because she’s just so much better looking. National Merit Scholars eat your heart out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 3:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.