Does an award on a website count as a "non-scholastic distinction"?

swenson · 10-29-2009, 09:42 PM

Last year one of my stories on a fanfic site was chosen for the weekly featured fiction award. Does this count as a non-scholastic distinction? If so, how to I classify it? There are people from all over the world on the site, so technically only "international" counts, but that makes it sound like some huge award.

Djokovic · 10-29-2009, 09:50 PM

Hmmm.. I am nto sure if that counts as a distinction personally. Unless it said specifically it was some sort of honor or award.

MIT's app, however, makes what qualifies as a distinction pretty flexible. So go ahead and put it here if you have the space.

swenson · 10-29-2009, 09:53 PM

What should I classify it as, though? (the School/Region/State/National/International part) Or can I leave that part blank, because it doesn't really apply?

swenson · 10-30-2009, 12:33 PM

Any other thoughts? The due date's coming up fast, and I really want to submit my application today.

Dex · 10-30-2009, 01:16 PM

djo is right, they don't care too much about where you put it.But personally I won't tag it at international I will send it untagged or with some kind of handmade tag at the end like
"(online contest)"
"-online"
"[website contest]"
but it isn't something worth stressing over don't waste your focus on that

k4r3n2 · 10-30-2009, 01:18 PM

I don't think it's considered an international award by any stretch - even though there are people from all over the world who frequent the website, I don't believe that the section of the population that participates is representative of the global population, which I understand most international awards aim to do (i.e., a common international award is the International Math Olympiad, which is a competition between the best math students in the world, as selected by their home countries and sent to compete on an international scale). I don't think your website qualifies.

If I'm understanding the award correctly, you were selected from between 25 - maybe a thousand participants to be featured for a week, correct? Presumably, they give out one of these awards per week, so given the number of participants and the number of awards, I would say that it is a regional distinction...I feel like if you're writing fanfiction, you're also writing to a specific subset of the population, so I feel like the regional analogy stands. You would also definitely want to include the name of the website that awarded you this distinction, I would think.

Don't get me wrong - it's very cool. But it's definitely not an international-level award, unless I am completely misunderstanding the nature of this website.

swenson · 10-30-2009, 02:34 PM

Yeah, that's why I didn't put down "international", because it makes it sound like some huge, highly prestigious award, when it's really not that large and the site certainly isn't that big.

"Regional" is more where it fits, but... do you think they'd understand what I meant by that? It's sort of a "region" of the Internet, after all. They need an extra spot for this... it's sort of a "community" award, in a sense, so I guess "regional" is the closest.

k4r3n2 · 10-30-2009, 03:15 PM

I mean, that's why I suggested that you put the website down. They might be curious about how many people visit it or the quality of the writing and such.

Djokovic · 10-30-2009, 04:12 PM

regional could work. Not specifying it and just saying (-online award) is fine too.

International is for stuff like math/bio/chem/physics Olympiad for country X, or something.
It is probably a very rare box for ppl to check.

swenson · 10-30-2009, 09:42 PM

OK, thanks everyone for all the help! I'm going to go with "regional" and put a note in the "extra info" box at the end.