@whatsindestiny Congrats!! It seems there are many of us here! Do you know the difference between state affiliate winner and national honorable mention? Or is there not really one?
@equationlover Congrats to you as well! From what I have heard over the years is that there are two different committees reviewing for national and affiliate awards. National awards are read by the NCWIT team and college students (I think) and they choose 50 National Winners and 350 National Honorable Mentions from all the applications. Then regardless of what anyone wins or doesn’t at the national level, applications are distributed to their respective states or regions where a new team of NCWIT volunteers read your application and choose state affiliate winners and honorable mentions. Sometimes it is possible that someone can get National Winner/Honorable Mention and not receive state affiliate winner. So in that sense getting any national level award is much more competitive. Does that answer your question?
@equationlover Congrats to you as well! From what I’ve heard from the past is that there are different committees that read the application at the national level and a different one for the affiliate awards. The national level committee reads all the applications and picks 50 winners and 350 honorable mentions. Then regardless everyone gets sent to their respective state or region committee to be evaluated for affiliate awards. Sometimes people have won National Winner/Honorable Mention and not an affiliate winner/honorable mention.
@whatsindestiny actually, I’m under the impression that if you win the National honors award you automatically win regional affiliate awards. This has been the case for me for the past two years
national honorable mention here!
some of my application points, for reference: senior girl, nj. state winner last year. in ‘experience w/ technology,’ i talked about competing in the usa computing olympiad (gold div, shooting for platinum next) and summer internships (9th grade at a tech museum, 10th grade at a start-up company, 11th at a university research lab w/ a project presentation at a well-regarded scientific conference). i listed my post-ap cs college classes (data structures, natural language processing, compilers) and post-ap calc bc classes (multivariate calc, diff eq, linear algebra). outside the classroom, i serve as president of computing club, a mentor for research club, and an independent web designer for various international literary magazines, so i elaborated a lot on my extracurricular involvement. i also submitted a portfolio of my website designs and talked about learning to code via tumblr. haha.
i think i set myself apart from others the most in the ‘future plans’ section. english / creative writing is probably my strongest extracurricular (not cs, lol) so for the career goals question i talked about being open-minded & wanting to bridging the historical divide between humanities and stem. i think i compared writing poetry to writing code. it’s a bit idealistic but i made sure to be as original as possible. for the ‘problem to solve’ q i talked about a future extension of my current research project, which is based on computationally modeling languages. i didn’t exactly shy away from technical jargon here but i did try to clearly state how it matters & why it matters. i also used humor, which probably worked.
super excited to reach the national level! i almost forgot about submitting my app until my cs teacher reminded me, lol. good luck for those still waiting and congrats to those who won!
When should we expect regional awards to be announced? I’m in north al.
@Mirandarwallace I think January-Februaryish from what I remember. However, I didn’t get the email until a couple weeks after it was already on the website; therefore try to check the website instead of your email. It depends on the affiliates on when you are contacted, as there are different regional ceremonies on different days. I think I found out I won at the beginning of the year, but didn’t get a email about winning or anything/details about the ceremony until early March.
Thr national winners and nat honorable mentions are on the website!! https://www.aspirations.org/blog/nearly-four-hundred-us-high-school-women-are-recognized-technological-achievements#Winners
congrats to everyone who got honorable mentions!!
just wondering, how many people applied this year? i’m applying next year and would like to know my chances of winning something
I hear people saying over 10,000 but I have heard that just over 3,600 applied. And regional is much easier to win than nationals… seems pretty feasible even if you’re not like some of these girls hosting clubs, starting non profits, interning at major companies. @needtosucceed27 I’m very passionate about STEM and Computing, but not very experienced. If I get a regional affiliate award I’ll post on here:)
Also congrats to all the national and nat honorable mentions! I would love to collaborate with you guys, (and maybe someone could teach me java lol). You guys are incredible though!
@needtosucceed27 yep I can confirm @Mirandarwallace is right. In their email they said over 3600 people applied, and one of my friends who Helps with the app process said around 3800~3900 people applied
@Mirandarwallace oh ok thank you! I’m just like you too; I’m passionate about STEM but just got into it during the fall of this school year (currently a sophomore) so I’m really late compared to other applicants who have probably learned multiple coding languages during middle school and have already built apps and other things like that. Hopefully they’ll take that into consideration when comparing my application to others who are more qualified but have also had more time and experience.
So where do we check for awards posted on the website? Somebody said that we may see it there first, and in the email later, but I don’t even see national winners in this section of the site yet.
@MangoLover11223 @whatsindestiny Do we need to confirm that we got their email?
@equationlover Yep, just be like hey whattup thanks for the honor lol.
Just curious-- Did anyone else get the email to join the NCWIT facebook page? It says the link doesn’t exist for me :((
@MangoLover11223 Yeah, same. I was like where did it go?
@palinoia hahahaaaaa that mini heart attack I had though
Guyssss I’ve emailed the people and maybe it’s a problem only I’m having but the fb group isn’t working for me?? It worked fine last year so can someone tell me it’s not as big a deal as I’m making it lol
Any news on regional affiliate awards?