2021 Unigo $10K Scholarship Winner

Unigo is super excited to announce the winner of our Unigo $10K Scholarship! We had 1,892 entries this year and we want to thank each one of you for applying. Our scholarship committee read and evaluated every essay and it was great to hear from all of you.

The essay asked “2020 was a year to be remembered. What will you remember most about 2020 and why is it important to you?” and participants had 250 words or less to answer.

Taylor Hughes from Raleigh, NC and a student at Grand Canyon University had the winning answer. She joins our list of Unigo scholarship winners and we couldn’t be prouder.

Check out Taylor’s winning entry.

Winning Scholarship Entry

Freedom was the theme of my 2020 experience. After years of harboring the stigma of mistakes I made as a nineteen year old man, my criminal record was finally expunged in January 2020. Expungement served as a benchmark of progress I’d made over the last ten years. Growing up without a father and being primarily raised by a mentally ill and drug addicted mother fostered a great attraction to anti-social and self-destructive behaviors within me. After a final period of incarceration at the age of nineteen, I’d had enough. I was done being in and out of detention or correctional facilities, seeing the shadows of my potential future in the faces of older inmates, drowning in anxiety due to the existential uncertainty of my lifestyle. Upon release I dedicated myself to school, attended therapy, built healthy relationships, and worked full time in and attempt to holistically rehabilitate myself while refraining from recidivating. Hours of introspection, pushing myself to study for the first time since middle school, and working menial jobs for long hours all cascaded into a singular green piece of paper signed by a district court judge. This paper symbolized my freedom to pursue the career in nursing I’d waited all this time for. Providing me with the tenacity I needed to complete A.S(s) in Allied Health and Natural Science, an A.A-T in Psychology, and become a licensed Certified Nursing Assistant while working full-time and co-parenting my four year old daughter; freeing me from the mistakes of my past.