Awards
The core focus of SMUNC is to foster productive debate on meaningful topics, encourage collaboration between delegates, and build strong leadership skills in high school students. We hope that all delegates will learn new skills and take away great memories from the weekend-long conference.
The awards we offer are given to delegates who demonstrate exceptional ability in their respective committees throughout the conference. Specifically, we look to research, speaking, writing, creativity, leadership, and diplomacy as key pillars of success. Although we are excited to honor delegates who excel in these categories, it is important to remember that the number of awards is limited.
Not earning an award has no bearing on the amount of learning and growth that happens throughout the weekend, and certainly will not affect your chances of acceptance to Stanford University.
We encourage you to be proud of the work you and every delegate put into the conference, regardless of the award results!
Award Distributions
There will be 1 Best Delegate and 1 Best Research awarded per committee. There will be a variable number of Outstanding Delegate and Honorable Mentions awarded per committee, based on the size of each committee and delegates’ performance.
In general, we will provide awards to the top 25% of each committee.
Delegation Awards
For the best Small and Large delegation awards we use a simple system of awards per delegate, with the highest adjusted sum winning the Best delegation award for their respective category. Double delegate committees are counted as two awards with each delegate receiving an award for their school.
To accommodate the adjusted award counts the weighting of awards has changed.
Honorable Mentions and Research Awards: 1 Point
Outstanding Delegate: 1.5 Points
Best Delegate: 2 Points