BOOSH!!!  On Friday, UniversityDecisions.com announced the winner of their Success Yearbook video contest and guess what?  The winner is me, baby…ME!

The $10,000 prize is going to be paid directly to the institution that holds my student loan.  $10,000 in cash would have been nice but I would’ve just blown that money on stupid stuff like tacos and credit card bills.  So I feel like I’m being forced (in a good way) to spend 100% of my winnings responsibly. And I’ll tell you, that 10K is going to take a massive, humongous chunk out of my student loan debt.  It won’t obliterate it completely but it will get me pretty close to the finish line.  And that means this prize is worth way more than $10,000.  It’s going to save me about SEVEN YEARS of student loan payments and thousands of dollars in interest.

Grand Prize Winner. Prize: $10,000 towards my student loan:

So this is one of the sweetest victories of my life and it’s significant for me in a few ways. For one thing, $10,000 is actually the largest video contest prize I’ve ever won. In all the years I’ve been entering these contests I’ve never been able to win a prize bigger than $5,000. So now that I’ve been able to break that $5K barrier I feel like I finally have a shot at winning some major contests. This win is also a big deal for me since it pushes my lifetime contest winnings well past the $50,000 mark. I bet there are at least a dozen other filmmakers out there that have won more doing contests than me but if there was a ranking of the top video contest winners of all time I feel like I’d finally be creeping my way up the list.

But the icing on the cake is that I almost didn’t enter this contest.  At least not this time around.  You see originally the sponsor was supposed to run this contest every three months and give out $10,000 four times this year.  I started working on my entry just a week or so before the deadline and votes were supposed to count towards a contestant’s score.  But the rules didn’t say just how important votes were.  Some of the other entries had been up for months so I had to assume they had already gotten a ton of votes.  I put a lot of work into my entry and I didn’t want to lose just because I submitted so late.  So I was thinking maybe I should wait until the next submission period so I could be the first person to upload an entry. That way I could rack up three months worth of votes by the time the next deadline passed.

But I decided to take a gamble and submit now rather than later.  And wouldn’t you know it, after the deadline passed the sponsor canceled the quarterly contest!!  They said that because of the success of the contest they were making it a monthly thing.  But instead of $10,000 they’d only be paying $2,500 towards the monthly winner’s student loan.  I actually think that’s great and a smaller monthly contest is a better idea than a big, quarterly contest.  But if I had waited to enter I would have felt like a freaking moron.  So this win was a real close call.

I still don’t know how important votes were but I think promoting my video on VCN did get me a lot of them. I could tell from my web traffic logs that a lot of people clicked on the link I posted.  So if you voted for me, thanks!  This win really means a lot to me and I appreciate the support.

If you have some student loan debt you should really check this contest out.  You can submit a short essay or a video and very few people are actually shooting videos.  So if you shoot something creative you might have a good shot at winning:

http://www.universitydecisions.com/success-yearbook/Default.aspx