5K Steem is about 825 USD. I would probably cash out and buy myself something nice to celebrate my birthday. I would also use some of the money to buy books I need during the last 3 months in School, and to help me pay off a small bill or two.
So yeah, I would probably use it to help myself to graduate.
In case I wouldn't be allowed to use it in real life, I would probably power up 50-60% of it and host multiple contests, where I would try to encourage and motivate newcomers and "lesser accounts" to produce quality content. I think it's important to reward and motivate these users so they actually feel that it would be worth to power up and/or invest in Steem.
What is "quality content"?
I think quality content is basically everything except spam & copy/pasted content. I mean, anything that your audience like and support should be quality, regardless of grammar, length etc.