Jessica Jacobs has come a long way since her early childhood days in an all-girls dorm at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Her father was in medical school while her mother worked in residence life, so the little family lived in an on-campus apartment.
“So I was just this little baby, toddling around the dorm,” she said.
Now the 22-year-old graduate teaching assistant in organizational communication at N.C. State, who recently won the title of Miss North Carolina, said people from those early days have been coming out of the woodwork. One woman even emailed Jacobs’ business manager asking about a little girl she used to babysit in the dorms.
“It’s kind of nice to know that they are excited and supportive of what I’ve chosen to pursue,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs has been competing in beauty pageants since her sophomore year in college in 2003. She said she did a mock interview for a scholarship in high school, and the people who ran the interview were closely affiliated with Miss North Carolina. She said they encouraged her to begin competing once she was old enough, and that the same group of people is one of her biggest supporters now.
However, it took her 10 preliminary competitions before she won her first title that made her eligible for the MIss North Carolina competition.
“You just improve more and more every time you do it in terms of how you handle your interview, how you speak on stage, what kind of dance — well, dancing for me — is most entertaining for an audience,” she said.
Perseverance was crucial, though, and while Jacobs said losing could be momentarily upsetting, for some reason she just kept wanting to go back.
“I guess I’m a glutton for punishment or something,” she said. “I had people who supported me and wanted to see me do well, so we’d discuss it and say ‘What can we fix? What can I do to get better at presenting myself?’ And that kind of thing and so I just kept trying. And I mean I really enjoyed it.”
According to Jacobs, the older a person gets, the harder it is to find a way to perform, and she sees pageants as her opportunity to do that. She also attributes much of her success to the people who have helped her along the way, like her mother, the people who initially encouraged her to compete and her personal trainer.
“My trainer, who helps me with the physical fitness portion, he cried that night [she won Miss North Carolina]. I mean he’s this big muscley, bulky guy and he’s boo-hooing,” she said. “People become really invested in the whole process, and they’ve invested just as much in it as I have.”
But with only one year left in her graduate career, Jacobs said she still plans on completing her degree and pursuing her original career plans helping CEOs and business people craft messages and work with media through communication consulting. She just sees her experience as MIss North Carolina as a sort of sabbatical in between.
But the next items on Jacobs’ plate are her responsibilities as Miss North Carolina and competing in the Miss America pageant. She said it hasn’t been announced whether or not it will be televised yet, but that it has been every year up until now.
“I’ll probably be nervous. I can’t imagine that I wouldn’t be,” Jacobs said. “That’s a completely different ballgame, national TV.”
And while Jacobs admits to being nervous about competing in the big pageant, she is trying not to let it get to her head.
“What I’ve found is that when you prepare so much for something like this you just get this feeling of calm,” she said. “I can be nervous all day but then right before I step on stage I feel calm because I know that I put the work in ahead of time to be ready.”
