Miss Grambling State University 2014-2015 Ginia Smith beat out dozens of beauty queens from Historically Black Colleges and Universities around the country to reign as one of EBONY magazine’s Top 10 Campus Queens who will grace the pages of the September issue of EBONY.

Since Smith was one of the top 10 beauty queens who received the most online votes, she traveled to Howard University in Washington, D.C. in June for a 12-hour photo shoot with hair and makeup stylists and lots of wardrobe changes.

“I want to give a really huge thank you to the people at Grambling for all the support and voting,” Smith said. “It probably got frustrating because they pushed back the end of the contest, but I want to thank everyone for sticking with me. I am especially appreciative of the alumni, because they really voted for me a lot, and they are good at supporting the students. At the end of the day, I was lucky because I got to represent my school.”

During her tenure as Miss Grambling State, she founded a community service organization called Heart of a Tiger, created Grambling’s Next Top Model scholarship competition and began an empowerment program for women on campus called G-Talk. Smith graduated from Grambling with a degree in biology in May. She is now attending dental school at Howard University, and she hopes that Grambling’s queens will continue to win this contest in the future.

“Before I went to the photo shoot, I had only been in D.C. once when I was 10. I never thought that I would be living there, but I am still GramFam. I am always going to be black and gold. I feel like this is a tradition that Grambling should continue. This year marks the second year that Grambling has been in EBONY magazine, and it would be awesome if we could get it every year,” Smith said.