Why did this Charlotte engineer leave her job? Because — surprise! — she’s now Miss USA.
Last Friday, Morgan Romano left her full-time job — as an application engineer at a respected Charlotte engineering firm — due to a series of events that we can be just about 100% certain will never again result in someone leaving a full-time engineering job in Charlotte.
After all, it’s not often that engineers leave their jobs because they won a pageant.
The 24-year-old University of South Carolina graduate describes the way she wound up having the 2022 Miss USA crown placed atop her head last month and thereby suddenly needing to quit her job like this: “Just weird.”
Just over a year ago, in January 2022, Romano was named Miss North Carolina USA at a ceremony in High Point, after years of falling short in state title attempts. Then, this past October, representing NC, Romano outlasted 49 other contestants at the Miss USA pageant in Reno, Nevada, but couldn’t quite best the 50th — R’Bonney Gabriel, a Texas-born model and fashion designer who became the first Filipina American woman to hold the national title.
And so that was that. Until it wasn’t.
“I came back to normal life. I was back at work. I was fully getting ready to close this chapter of my life, and be done with pageants and go back to just being a full-time engineer,” says Romano, who at that point had been Miss NC USA for 7-1/2 months and was looking forward to handing off to her successor.
But during a visit to New York City with her mom, her aunt and her grandmother, on Jan. 14, the four women were crowded around an iPad in a hotel room watching as Gabriel reached the Top 16 of the Miss Universe competition.
“I started sweating. I was like, ‘Oh my Lord,’” Romano recalls. Miss USA then went to the Top 5. Then she beat out the second runner-up, and finally, it became official: Gabriel had won Miss Universe — and because the Miss USA Organization requires its Miss USAs to relinquish their USA crowns if they become Miss Universe, Romano and her family knew she was about to backdoor her way into a Miss USA title.
“Everyone in that hotel hated us,” Romano says, laughing, “because it (the competition) ended at like midnight, and we were screaming at the top of our lungs.”
Gabriel officially crowned Romano at a ceremony during the Miss Alabama USA competition on Jan. 27.
This unique type of succession plan happens every time an American wins Miss Universe, though it doesn’t happen often. In the history of the Miss Universe pageant, started in 1952, Miss USA has won just nine times. Since Romano was born in July 1997 it’s happened only once, when Rhode Island’s Olivia Culpo (longtime girlfriend of former Carolina Panthers star Christian McCaffrey) won Miss Universe and relinquished the crown to Maryland’s Nana Meriwether.
In an hour-long interview with The Charlotte Observer on Wednesday morning, Romano talked about how she got into chemical engineering, how she got into pageants, overcoming feelings of self-doubt in both of those areas of her life, and much more.
Here are seven key things we learned.
1. She’s not originally from North Carolina
Romano was born and raised in the small upstate-New York town of Johnstown, which is a little less than 50 miles northwest of Albany. A despiser of upstate-New York winters, she applied only to colleges in the South and settled on USC in part because she was charmed by the buildings in its Old Campus District. Since her parents also had grown tired of cold weather, they decided to move them and her younger brother to Charlotte around the same time she started her freshman year at South Carolina, in 2016.
She majored in chemical engineering.
As a junior, she worked at the R.E. Mason engineering firm in Charlotte as part of a co-op internship program; continued doing work for the company remotely from Columbia on a part-time basis as a senior; then was hired full-time after she graduated in May 2020.
2. She fell into chemical engineering
“I was originally going to go to school for chemistry,” Romano says. “I always loved science when I was in high school. But my chemistry teacher said, ‘You have such an extroverted personality, and if you major in chemistry it’s a lot of just ‘alone’ work. Like, you work in a lab alone, or you’re a teacher.’ She said, ‘You should go to school for chemical engineering, because the career opportunities after that are so much more broad than if you just have a chemistry degree.’ I knew nothing about chemical engineering. But I just completely believed in her, and chose chemical engineering. After my first year (at USC), I actually really, really enjoyed it and loved it.”
3. She drank ‘the pageant Kool-Aid’
Romano grew up competing with an all-girls dance team in her hometown. She didn’t compete in her first pageant until she was a junior in high school, at the Miss New York Outstanding Teen Pageant in Saratoga Springs. “My mom made me do it,” she says, laughing.
But during her freshman year at USC, she decided she needed to get involved in an activity that would help her meet other young women, since her college program was so heavily dominated by male students. This time, Romano chose pageants on her own. She chose them, she says, because one of the components of pageants hosted by the Miss America organization is a talent presentation — and she could certainly dance.
“I had no expectations,” she says, “and it’s always kind of the joke of, you know, you drink the pageant Kool-Aid. You do it one time and you can’t stop. You get addicted to it.”
In 2017, she made the Top 10 at Miss South Carolina America. In 2018, she was third runner-up in Miss SC. That same year, she also placed in the Top 10 at the Miss South Carolina USA contest. (There are plenty of other differences between Miss USA and Miss America pageants, but for one, Miss USA pageants don’t have a talent portion, and for two, a Miss USA advances to Miss Universe whereas Miss America is a final stop on that route.)
In 2019, she was first runner-up at Miss SC America. In 2021, after all pageants took a year off due to COVID, she was second runner-up to Miss NC USA.
“There were plenty of days where I was like, ‘Why am I even doing this? Something is wrong with me. I keep (falling short). I’m missing a quality to win, and I’m never gonna get it.’” she says. “I had those same days in college — ‘I can’t do this. I’m not smart enough. Everything is overwhelming. I’m never gonna graduate. I’m gonna be a horrible engineer.’ But those are just lies that we tell ourselves in moments of stress and being overwhelmed.”
So she flipped her mindset: “‘You’re always close. You have something about you that the judges love. You just need to refine it and you’ll win, when it’s your time.’ Or, you know, in school, just like, ‘You have everything that it takes, you just have to keep going.’”
Finally, in 2022, she finally ascended to the top of a state heap when she won Miss NC USA.
And she reacted in a way befitting a beauty pageant queen. “Oh, I freaked out. I was shocked. Completely. I screamed out loud.”
4. She didn’t want to be a stereotype
At USC, Romano often felt like she needed to prove herself.
“Say I had a group project and I was paired up with three guys for it. I almost feel like I worked a little bit harder and put in a little bit more — not because they ever said anything or felt that I wasn’t capable, I just felt like I carried the weight of being a woman in STEM on my back and was like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna prove that I’m the best in this group, so that they can see that they should take me seriously, and women in STEM seriously,’” she says.
But she admits she has sometimes been more self-conscious than she needed to be.
“I remember, I was so scared to tell my one professor that I needed to take a test early because I had something to do with a pageant,” she says. “He’s just this big guy, and he’s a little bit harsh, and really pushes you; school, your grades, are very important to him. And I felt like he was gonna look at me differently and think, ‘She’s not smart,’ or, ‘She does pageants, why is she in engineering?’ He was so supportive, though.” And from then on, she says, he would often ask her how her competitions were going.
Romano also says she tried to keep quiet about pageant stuff at her job in Charlotte, worried that “they’re gonna think I’m not a good worker. They’re gonna think I care about pageants and not work, and not be an engineer. ... But obviously I could not hide it once I was Miss North Carolina and competing in Miss USA and on TV, and they ended up having a whole watch party at the office when I competed in Miss USA. ... I really didn’t expect that.”
5. She’s doing just fine, mental health-wise
Even though she has had those doubts she mentioned, and even though she’s sometimes been self-conscious, Romano says “naturally I’m a confident person. I’m someone who’s like, ‘I can do this.’ There’s pockets of doubt, but my mom raised me to be a strong woman — and I would say that I definitely am.”
She says there’s been a lot more dialogue about mental health in the pageant community over the past year, since former Miss NC/former Miss USA Cheslie Kryst jumped to her death last Jan. 30, one day after Romano was crowned Miss North Carolina.
“It was a big eye-opener, for a lot of people,” Romano says. “A lot of people in the pageant community — this is horrible, but we’ve come to accept that people just troll us. They just comment horrible things. But I think we’ve seen a lot less of that since that happened with Cheslie. She was very open about how much it hurt her, the comments that she would get when she was Miss USA. And I think that that was very eye-opening to people who maybe were mindlessly commenting rude things on girls’ photos, to maybe think before you comment, because Miss USA is a real person and not some robot.”
The Miss USA organization, she says, recently started providing competitors with mental-health training and access to therapists, and adds “that we’ve all just been more open about our mental health, and making sure that we’re checking in on one another, and realizing we’re not all bulletproof.”
6. She has a busy year ahead, and then...
Obviously. That’s why she had to step away from her job in Charlotte. (Although she says she will continue to work a few hours for R.E. Mason here and there, remotely.)
She’ll be traveling a lot, and will have to quite literally wear the crown at a variety of events, including several state pageants. But Romano also will be doing “a lot of work advocating for STEM,” from the middle school level on up through the community college level; and spending time with Miss USA’s nonprofit partners, including Smile Train, which helps children with cleft lips and palates, and Best Buddies International, which supports people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Her commitment will last into the fall, when a new Miss USA is crowned. After that?
“Oh, I’m done,” she says, laughing. “I am done.”
She won’t speculate much on where she’ll be come 2024, but she hinted that there might be future opportunities unrelated to engineering and perhaps even a change of scenery geographically. Romano also says she’d love to eventually go to law school and become a patent lawyer, but that she is “still drowning in student debt from my undergrad, so probably not — unless someone would like to sponsor.”
The only sure thing is that she’s excited about the possibilities.
“Being Miss USA opens so many doors, I really don’t know,” she says. “I am a control freak in my life for sure, and when I don’t know, that scares me. But I’m like, you’ve been given this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a reason, and I know that it’s gonna become clear as the year goes on why — what my purpose is after this.
“I’m just not sure what that is right now.”
