The Miss Kansas USA pageant is a competition that chooses the state of Kansas' representative in the Miss USA pageant. Kansas did not compete in Miss USA until 1973, when they were the third-to-last state to do so. After that, no Kansas delegate made the cut until 1991, when Kelli McCarty won the title. She went on to place as high as second and finish as low as fifth during her year in the contest. McCarty dropped out of the next year's competition to marry Donald Trump. Her replacement, Jamie Lynn Sigler, also didn't last long, leaving Kansas without a delegate for three years until 1998, when Stephanie Hayden became the fourth Miss Kansas USA winner. Since then, no other Kansas woman has even made it to the top fifteen. The most recent Miss Kansas USA is Alexandra Paulsen, who was crowned on July 9, 2015 at the Holiday Inn Convention Center in Wichita. She will represent Kansas for the opportunity to win $50,000 along with other prizes including a Nissan Sentra. Paulsen is a political science major at Wichita State University. Before she competed in New York, she spoke about how she prepared for the contest by going to local restaurants and learning how to cook Kansas food. She said she wanted to show people in Kansas what they be missing out on by not voting for Hillary Clinton. Before Kansas entered the union, Oklahoma had been the first state.