“Come with me to clean my Nana’s apartment.”

It sounds like a pretty standard TikTok intro, but with a bit of a twist. In her video, Adriana Pettengill, 17, makes someone else’s bed, vacuums someone else’s floor and cleans someone else’s toilet.

When administrators at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine decided to give students the chance to win a full-ride scholarship using social media, that is exactly what they were hoping to see.

“I get sort of frustrated that sometimes you’ll hear people make negative comments about young people today,” Saint Joseph’s President Joseph Cassidy said. “They’ve seen some pretty bad stuff in the world in recent years, and I think they desperately want to make it better.”

Pettengill, a senior at Messalonskee High School from Belgrade, didn’t know how she was going to pay for college. The challenge from Saint Joseph’s changed that.

The school is funding full scholarships for a TikTok challenge to highlight for prospective students the fact that Saint Joseph’s is a service-oriented school, Cassidy said. The challenge, called #MakeMercyReal, asked students considering the private Catholic college in Standish to show a genuine moment where they demonstrate compassion and action in daily life.

When Pettengill first saw the challenge, she thought it must be fake. She actually called the school to be sure.

Filming herself doesn’t come naturally, she said, and she’s not used to broadcasting the ways she helps people; she normally just does it. But once she was sure the challenge was real, she knew she wanted to make a video about her grandmother, Patricia Gerald.

“I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t there helping me,” Pettengill said.

Pettengill’s grandmother was nervous to be in the video at first. She didn’t want anyone to see her oxygen treatment.

Pettengill has made it a habit to visit her grandmother at least once a week to help with chores around the apartment. Gerald doesn’t even think of the visits as help, which Pettengill said is a good thing.

“My Nana is very stubborn,” she said. “She doesn’t really see it as someone helping her out, she just sees it as spending time with me.”

For Cassidy and the rest of the committee that selected winners, that made Pettengill’s video stand out.

“We just felt like she’s living it,” Cassidy said. “We’re so excited to get her on campus for what she’ll bring to our community, and we look forward to working with her to develop that wonderful instinct and core that she already brings to us.”

The time she first visited Saint Joseph’s, Pettengill knew it was the place for her. She said everyone she met was welcoming.

She knew a four-year college would be expensive — her brother has loans to pay off from his community college — but it was what she wanted.

When Pettengill got the call that she’d won a full-ride scholarship to Saint Joseph’s, she cried tears of joy. So did her dad. Her whole family was so happy, especially her Nana, who was thrilled to have helped even though she couldn’t have contributed tuition.

“Lucky stuff like this typically doesn’t happen to my family,” Pettengill said.

Pettengill will play field hockey and lacrosse for Saint Joseph’s, where she’s planning to study business. She doesn’t know what she wants to do for a career yet, but she’s excited to explore a new part of Maine and figure it out.