By Destiny Alvarado

This past year, West Virginia’s Jim Justice has released a statewide drawing ‘Babydog’ sweepstake to increase awareness of COVID-19 vaccinations opportunities and provide amazing incentives for West Virginians. To be able to apply to be in the drawing for the incentives, you would have to be vaccinated. These incentives include free gas for ten years, luxury high end sports car, WVU season tickets for either basketball or football, four to five full year scholarships, $150,000 towards future wedding, and much more. 

One of these prizes landed in the hands of Wesleyan’s own Rebecca Osborne. She entered the sweepstake this past June and ended up winning in the first round of pickings on June 20th. She was able to meet the governor and was presented her reward which was a four full year scholarship to any public school in West Virginia. Since she is a student here at Wesleyan, a private school, they allowed her to transfer the scholarship to be applied to her tuition here.  

She stated, “It was cool to be able to win, a great opportunity, and I also got to pet Babydog”.  Osborne, whose major is mathematics and computer science, is in her senior year here at Wesleyan. She is a part of the tennis team, Alpha Delta Pi, and she is also a math tutor on campus. When asked about what she is going to do with the extra years scholarship since she is a senior, she stated that she is now thinking about going to graduate school when before, graduate school was not really thought about due to costs. She mentioned that when applying for the Babydog sweepstake she didn’t expect to win anything, but now that she has this scholarship she is able pursue her education even further with no limitations.

Picture by Destiny Alvarado