UWS student takes top honors

A University of Wisconsin-Superior senior took first prize in a national ethics essay contest.

Mae Gibson was named winner of the nationwide Elie Wiesel Foundation of Humanity Prize in Ethics Essay Contest. Gibson receives a $5,000 prize and will be the guest of the Wiesel Foundation when she travels to New York City next fall to meet Elie Wiesel. Her essay will be posted on the foundation’s Web site at www.eliewieselfoundation.org.

“Being awarded first place in this incredibly prestigious competition is an overwhelming honor,” Gibson said. “Not only did I win a very generous scholarship, but I will have the enormously humbling pleasure of meeting Professor Wiesel in September. Having the opportunity to meet him and knowing that he has read and put his name on something I’ve written is probably the greatest honor of my life. To have had people read such a small, personal essay and deem it worthy of national recognition is deeply moving.”

The Prize in Ethics Essay Contest is conducted by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, created by and named for the Holocaust survivor who became an educator, author and Nobel Prize winner. The annual competition challenges college students to analyze ethical issues confronting them.

Gibson’s essay, “God in Our Ethics,” is based on a painful experience she had as a youth in her native Florida with an acquaintance named David Wyatt. She wrote and refined her essay in an English class she is taking at UWS with Associate Professor Maureen Salzer.

“I am not inherently proud of much that I do, but I was proud of this essay — even before anybody told me they thought it was good — and that makes its recognition that much more profound for me,” Gibson said.

Gibson, of Virginia, Minn., is majoring in English and in an individually designed major she named “Narrating Our Values.”

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