For Feinberg student Marciana Lee, life in medical school isn’t all academics. “Just because it’s not research doesn’t mean it’s not as worthwhile,” she says of her latest foray into pageantry. She recently won Miss Northern Illinois and will compete in the Miss Illinois America pageant next month. If she wins and goes on to win Miss America, she must take two years off from med school and reapply if she wants to return. “I would really regret it if I had the chance to be Miss America and I didn’t take it,” she says.
She’s not the first NU student to make this decision – in 1998, then-Northwestern theater student Kate Shindle won the title. But it’s not right for every co-ed. “If your lifestyle is partying and getting crazy, this is not the job for you, ” says Amalia Schwerdtmann, executive director of Miss Illinois Scholarship Association.
Even so, the preparation can be grueling. After winning Miss Korea Chicago last spring, SESP senior Alice Kim went to Korea for a month before facing about 60 women in the national competition. “It was basically like pageant boot camp,” Kim said. In addition to diet and exercise, she worked to perfect a group dance routine, walking and interviewing every day until 3 a.m. At one point, she landed in a hospital hooked up to an IV because of exhaustion. “I don’t think I slept for 42 hours before the pageant,” she says.
The competition was steep. “I definitely felt overweight when I was over there,” says Kim, who wears a zero or a double zero. “The other girls in Korea are stick thin,” she says. “You could distinguish who was from America just by weight.” After her win in the Chicago round, Kim has done some modeling. On Dillo Day, she will co-host this year’s Chicago pageant.
As a “tomboy” kid, Medill junior Lindsay Schafer never thought she would be in a pageant. “I thought it was only something the really frilly, frilly frou-frou girls did,” she says. But after winning $3,500 toward her tuition before college, she has competed in seven or eight more events. Schafer, who is in ROTC, says she has learned to balance being a “pageant girl,” a “military girl” and a student. “If I wore pageant makeup to class I would look like a complete idiot,” she says. When she first came to NU, her fellow ROTC members had bets going on how long she would last in the program. “The longest they gave me was a month,” she says. “I’m here proving them wrong.”
