<p>For example, if you're involved in debate or chess, would it be advisable to list any tournament awards that weren't first place, or even any tournaments that weren't at the state level in the first place. How remarkable would it be list all the tournament awards you've won, if there are several -- I don't plan to list them all, but should I even acknowledge something like "many tournament awards ranging from 1st to 5th place"? (If for example, there might be 25-30 people in a tournament.) </p>
<p>How significant does an award have to be to be listed?</p>
<p>I ask this because I'm quite poor in the awards area and am scrounging to list any available -- I don't have any national merit semifinalist/finalist [was disqualified from the whole process by listing that I wasn't seeking American citizenship ASAP!], and worse, I always had a knack for missing high honors throughout my career because one subject always had to be a 92, so I only acquired that basic qualification this year actually. I only have the various awards I have won from participating in debate and chess competitions, and several academic competition awards I got from participating in the New South Wales competitions in secondary school in Singapore, so I am worried at how pathetic it'd look to AdComs.</p>
<p>Unless you have more relevant or important awards, go ahead and put them.</p>
<p>I think "relevance" is more importance than "significance." On my application, I had impressive awards to put, but my writing awards were more relevant to the theme of the entire application, so I put those first. In the room I had left, I put other "significant" awards, though with relevance as a guide.</p>
<p>You can also put awards that you don't think are quite "significant" in the additional info section. But if you don't have anything else that you think would be better, go ahead and put it in the honors/awards section. It will only make you look better.</p>
<p>Now, putting awards like Who's Who? and such isn't the best idea, but if you've won tournaments--even if they're not on the state level--that's impressive.</p>
<p>How detailed should I be in listing tournament awards, since for example I wouldn't remember every single one of them ... </p>
<p>Also, should I specify the level of the award if I most of my debate tournaments awards are on the novice/JV level -- my high school's team only started this year, so I've only started competing on the varsity level the latter half of this season.</p>
<p>I don't know about chess, but for debate, most of the seniors in my class are listing all of their first through third places. An example entry:
First place in NLD debate at Spring High School, 2005
You're including the fact that it's in the novice level of LD/CX but not stressing it. :)</p>
<p>I said the same thing, but the seniors say that they will either A) be familiar enough to know what it stands for or B) not really care but want some sort of category for validation purposes.
It's a good question, and if you ask anyone who would know for sure, listen to them. >>;
(For the record, one of our seniors got accepted to Stanford ED-- so the acronyms can't be that devastating. :P)</p>
<p>Listing your USCF Ranking (i.e you are TOP100 in the nation by Age) would
be a cool thing to do. National/Regional/State could probably be clubbed in
as one entry under your "Activity:Chess"...?</p>
<p>If you play chess in your school league, then listing whether your school
is the league champion might help...?
:)</p>
<p>I'll tell you what I did, though I'm not a debater: I listed all the awards, designated their levels, and used acronyms. However, I also included a resume/activity list for clarification and details. (I figured that with so little space, acronyms were necessary.)</p>
<p>i put my most significant debate award (full qual to PF TOC) in the academic honors section because I had room, talked about debate for my activities short answer, and put all my debate awards in the additional info doc, divided up by significance (national vs regional). In addition to tournament places/speaker awards, I also put my NFL degree in there but I didn't have room to explain. I figure that they either know what NFL is and what the degrees signify or it doesn't really matter.</p>
<p>Pretend you're writing a paper so you should always spell out the acronym the first time it appears. So one of my lines would say Lincoln-Douglas (LD) blah blah. I didn't, but I guess you can abbreviate Varsity to Var. and etc for JV, and Nov.</p>