Jasmine Brockington, Journalist and Scholarship Winner

Write Your Story

The application process for the $100,000 Taco Bell Live Más scholarship is, understandably, quite involved. It entails the creation of a 2-minute video about the applicant’s passion and how they aim to pursue it through their education.

“Everyone's just like: ‘This is so time consuming,’” recalled Jasmine Brockington, recipient of the full Taco Bell Live Más prize. “And I had a ball.”

Brockington has wanted to be a writer since the beginning of her ventures into the literary world. Homeschooled until the 10th grade, her greatest support was her family; her grandmother encouraged her to read and write as much as possible.

“I would write little news articles about my family. I would make little videos,” Brockington said. “I would read books every day.”

For her sophomore year of high school, Brockington entered the public school system and excelled. She became a reporter, writing stories and conducting interviews to create news packages for her school. But when she started researching colleges, Brockington realized that pursuing a career as a writer would be expensive, no matter how much promise her skill held.

“Whoa,” she remembered thinking when she looked at the tuition costs. “This is a lot of money.”

Brockington’s family would not let her dreams flicker out, though. Her mother directed her to use her craft to earn money for school, sending every scholarship application she could find and assigning it like homework.

“She knew I was good at writing, and I was good at making videos,” Brockington said, “and there are so many scholarships that are either videos, writing, or both… the writing, the essays, doing the videos: it was never too hard for me.”

By her senior year, Brockington was a true scholarship-applying expert. She used Scholarships.com to match with opportunities tailored to her skills and circumstances, exploring a vast range of funds she never knew existed.

“I’d be saying to my friends: apply to this, apply to that. And it’s all the same website,” she said. Having a centralized hub for all the funds available simplified Brockington’s process; she no longer needed to sift through pages upon pages of Internet search results to find what worked for her, saving valuable time in her scholarship search.

Then, in December, she came across the Taco Bell Live Más scholarship. She knew the video application wouldn’t be an issue; as a news anchor for her school and a dedicated, passionate individual, she would have no trouble articulating her goals on camera. All she had to do was to decide whether she would apply for the $5,000 fund, the $10,000 fund, or the $25,000 fund.

“[I asked my mom:] how much should I ask for?” Brockington recounted. “She said, ‘Go big or go home.’”

In April of Brockington’s senior year in high school, the Taco Bell Live Más scholarship committee coordinated with her mother and the school journalism program to sneak the big news into one of her morning announcements. Live on air, the team surprised Brockington with a massive check just as she read out the report— she had won the scholarship.

“And then it really just took off from there,” said Brockington, now a highly-involved rising senior studying journalism at Hampton University. She leads writing organizations both on and off campus; she’s about to start an internship in New York City. Each year she has reapplied for the Taco Bell Live Más scholarship and won it again, totaling the maximum amount of $100,000 towards her college career.

As a child, Brockington wrote stories to read to her grandmother; now, she is a full-fledged journalist, shining her literary light in everything she does. Her advice for other students is simple. “Dream as big as you can.”