Kate Marie Grinold, who graduated from GW this spring, soon swapped her mortarboard for a tiara after winning the Miss District of Columbia Pageant.

Grinold, who will go on to compete in the Miss America Pageant in January, worked as a bar tender and shift manager for Rugby Café when she was recruited for the Miss D.C. pageant a week before preliminaries. She won the competition on May 31.

“One of our local patrons, Neil (Alpert), was talking to one of our servers and said he was asked to be a preliminary judge for the Miss D.C. competition,” Grinold said. “He had been asked to recruit some people and he thought about me.”

Alpert, director of institutional relations for the Washington National Opera, said he was impressed to see her dance performance of “Don Quixote” during the pageant.

“She came in there and showed us that she really had the skills to perform on stage,” Alpert said. “With every leap and every turn, she was really the real deal when it came to talent.”

Her platform for Miss D.C., named “Operation Backpack,” focuses on improving public education in the District. She said her goal is to make sure that all D.C. students have their own textbooks, SAT prep book and other materials.

The Miss D.C. pageant awarded Grinold a $5,000 academic scholarship and she will now have the opportunity to compete for more scholarship money in the Miss America Pageant. Grinold, the former valedictorian of her high school, paid her way through GW using student loans, job money and an alumni award. She said most of the money she won from the Miss D.C. competition went to paying off student loans.

“GW is a very expensive, but they are also very gracious (with financial aid). I’m really happy to say I stayed and received my degree from GW,” said Grinold, adding that she almost left because she was recruited to work as a professional ballet dancer in California. “It’s been an amazing experience to be the first person in my family to graduate from a university and the fact that I was able not only to achieve that, but also graduate from the Elliott School is incredible.”

After Miss D.C. 2008, Grinold said she wants to work as a paralegal at a law firm until she can save enough money to go to law school and focus on international law.

She hopes to differentiate herself from the other competitors in Miss America through a unique platform based on her studies at GW, she said. She said she will choose a national and international issue because “we are a national and international city.”.

“I’ve begun to develop a national platform on human trafficking,” said Grinold, who wrote a 30-page paper in human trafficking for one of her classes at GW. “I want to bring a platform to Miss America that they have never seen.”

Three of the five finalists in the Miss D.C. competition were from GW. 2008 graduate Jordan Kay won second runner-up. Lohr Beck, a sophomore, made it into the finals. The other women represented American, Catholic and the University of Maryland.

“It took four years to get my degree and in my first week out I am being invited to the State Department to be briefed,” Grinold said. “I feel like I’m going to do a lot for the city and for the country.”

The Miss America competition will be held in Las Vegas, and Grinold and the other Miss America contestants will be filming a reality television show about the Miss America pageant this fall.