For a chance to publish their greeting cards, Diamond Bar High School’s beginning computer graphics classes submitted designs to the national Greeting Cards Competition hosted by The Gallery Collection. This year, seven students placed in the Top 100 January evaluation for the national contest.

Sophomores Jennifer Lee, Junho Lee, Madison Nadal, Joycelyn Ung, juniors Julia Churchill and Nathan Lin and senior Jot Singh designed cards that were put online for voting. The Greeting Cards competition is a national scholarship contest open all year to anyone above the age of 14.

The winner receives a $10,000 scholarship along with a $1,000 prize awarded to the winner’s school.

Any type of greeting card is accepted, ranging from birthday cards to seasonal cards. Among the thousands of submissions, the Gallery Collection chooses its 100 for every month, from which online voters can select their favorites. The top ten favorites of each month move on to the final round, in which the company will choose one winner to receive the grand prize. The final winner will be announced on May 1.

Among the seven DBHS students who made it to the online voting round, two garnered enough votes for the top ten. Lee and Singh will move on to the final round with a chance to be chosen as the scholarship winner. Inspired by her childhood wish, Lee submitted a card with a window showing a snowy village with Santa flying with reindeer.

“I decided to [make] a Christmas card because I remember as a kid I would look at the window at night to try to catch a glimpse of Santa,” she said. “So for the competition I decided to give life to what I wanted to see as a kid.”

Singh drew a picture of a snowman leaving a trail of stardust during the night.

“The moon and the stars are like ornaments hanging in the sky and the snowman is made out of stars and leaves a stardust mark on the ice,” Singh said.

In the eight years that DBHS teacher Alina Gallardo’s computer graphics class has submitted cards, there has never been such a large pool of students who placed in the top 100. Gallardo requires her students participate in the contest every year in hopes of having them learn beyond the class and computer screen.

“It’s real life experience learning how to make graphics because if their entry gets selected, their entry would be a greeting card that the company would sell,” Gallardo said. “It’s experience in creating for production.”