Sam Wallin, left, and Jayden Kristie were among the top 2025 winners in the U.S. Bank scholarship sweepstakes program.
Seven students received a total of $55,000 to use for college through the program
When Jayden Kristie got the call that he was the winner of the $20,000 grand prize in the U.S. Bank scholarship sweepstakes program, he didn’t pick up.
“I thought it was probably spam so I declined it,” Kristie said. “They left a voicemail saying I was the grand prize winner, then I got an email.”
Kristie and his father did their due diligence and realized the information was true.
“Once my suspicions were gone, all that was in my head was excitement,” he said.
Kristie, a freshman at Iowa State University, is one of seven winners in the scholarship program for 2025. He qualified for the grand prize by completing more than 100 financial education modules – 126, to be precise – through the Zogo mobile app.
“They’re great,” he said of the modules. “There are slides with info and then it quizzes you at end. I really liked that. I had a little experience with financial literacy already but there were things I learned from the app.”
Kristie is majoring in physics, something he said he developed a passion for in high school, and chose Iowa State because of its physics program.
“I had a one-on-one meeting with a professor here and was told that Iowa State was part of the Manhattan Project, which was really cool,” he said.
“I think it’s a really unique way of giving out a scholarship. You actually learn something and there’s a goal and purpose to it.”
– Sam Wallin
No essay required
Sam Wallin had already applied for several other scholarships when his dad, a U.S. Bank client, saw information about the bank’s scholarship program at usbank.com.
The other scholarship programs required entrants to submit essays, and Wallin was relieved to see that he could enter the bank’s program by completing the financial education modules.
“I was done writing essays at that point,” he said. “This was something different, which I really appreciated.”
Wallin is a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying biological systems engineering, which he said brings together math, physics, engineering and biology, all topics he loves.
Wallin is a first-place winner in the U.S. Bank sweepstakes and received $10,000, which he said his family can definitely use given that he is one of three triplets who are college freshmen and he has an older brother who’s also attending.
“I’m one of four in college so we’re having a lot of expenses right now,” he said. “We’re definitely very grateful for it.”
Wallin said he hopes to go to medical school in the future and receiving $10,000 improves his chances of that.
He completed 110 of the Zogo financial education modules to qualify for the first-place prize.
“I would just spend 10 minutes before bed to knock two or three modules out. It was interesting enough that I stuck with it through more than 100 modules,” he said.
“I think it’s a really unique way of giving out a scholarship,” Wallin said. “You actually learn something and there’s a goal and purpose to it.”
The U.S. Bank Student Scholarship Program has been running for more than 13 years. The 2026 scholarship will launch Feb. 2 and details will be available on the U.S. Bank Student Scholarship Program website at that time.
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