A former Whitsundays teen has turned down a lucrative sponsorship at a Brisbane university, partly over the school's links with mining giant Adani.

Proserpine State High School OP1 student Emily Jukes was offered one of 110 Vice-Chancellor's scholarships to the Queensland University of Technology, worth $30,000.

The 18-year-old was split between accepting the scholarship and taking her "second choice" course at QUT or ignoring it for her top choice at rival University of Queensland - until she found out about QUT's link to Adani.

"Upon hearing that QUT had openly supported Adani, that kind of helped me make my decision to go to UQ instead," she said.

"I come from the Whitsundays, which is a small area that it is going to have a lot of negative impacts... from the mining business and also the Abbot Point expansion, which would have been like a bit of a slap in the face to my old hometown if I'd gone with a university that was supporting that."