She’s on the way to comic greatness, if only she can make lots of people laugh.

The 20 year-old is the only woman who cracked the top ten in the contest that boasted about 500 applicants. Read more about the contest and Walch’s role in it in a previous story.

Her final challenge was to create a large, color Sunday-style comic with an accompanying character sheet or an explanation of the cartoon’s comic philosophy. “I had to turn the strip in a week ago and have been continuously double-guessing the way I decided to draw it since,” Walch says. “[Wednesday] will hopefully be a big relief.”

As for how she came up with her idea for her second challenge, she says, “I had a lot of ideas for the last cartoon, but it was difficult to choose since we were only turning in one this round – and no matter which one I picked, it felt like there would always be questions, like, ‘Is that the best thing she could come up with? Why would she choose her one cartoon to be about that?’ So I tried to get around those concerns by limiting myself to coming up with a Sunday-style strip about Sunday-style strips.”

If Walch wins the popular vote in this last phase of the contest, she will win a one-month strip in the Washington Post and a chance at syndication. She’s still a little nervous about the whole thing, but glad she’s in the home stretch.

"I'd probably go back and change about 20 things about the cartoon if I could right now, but since I can't, I've been trying my hardest not to think about the contest at all,” says the math and biophysics double major. “This has actually been easier than it would otherwise have been because I am at science camp at the moment. If I weren't, I'd probably have locked myself in a room without Internet for the majority of July.”

Visit the contest website to see the finalists’ cartoons and offer your opinion.

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