2023 SEP 05 | Written by Ashley Marie Johnson, FIRST Robotics Competition Program Specialist & Erin Fadden, FIRST Tech Challenge Project Manager
We are so excited to announce some updates to the Dean’s List Award!
We have spent the past twelve months deep diving into the Dean’s List Award and asking folks from our community for their input on the award. This list includes colleges and universities, prior Dean’s List Award winners, experienced judges, alumni, sponsors and suppliers, Dean Kamen, and more. We discovered that the perceived goal of this award differed over the many groups we spoke to. Some thought it was college admissions focused, others thought it was more about leadership, and others thought it was more about being an ambassador for FIRST ®.
Taking all of this feedback into consideration, along with our goal of ensuring that the award was aligned with the goals of the organization as a whole, we decided to move forward with the intent to:
Make the award more accessible while still maintaining the level of outstanding accomplishment the award represents.
Encourage more teams to nominate their students.
Tighten up the goal, vision, and mission of the award and in doing so:
Put less focus on the college/university aspect of this award, aligning with many of the changes FIRST has been making overall – since this path is not the path for every student.
Put more focus on the leadership aspect of the award.
At its core, the Dean’s List Award was accomplishing what we wanted it to: identifying outstanding student leaders. Because of this, the changes we are making are not extreme, but instead do shift the award more towards a focus on exceptional student leaders within our program.
Updates to Criteria
Some of this criteria will look familiar to you, but please note that there are changes to it that we’d like for you to take into consideration while making a nomination, so please be sure to familiarize yourself with the below:
Demonstrated leadership and commitment to the FIRST Core Values
Effectiveness at increasing awareness of FIRST in their school and community
Demonstrates passion for a long-term commitment to FIRST
The student’s individual contributions to their team contribute to the overall success of the team
Proven experience in areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
The student is a role model and can motivate and lead fellow team members
To make sure the essay prompts mapped to the updated criteria, we’ve also made some adjustments to the nomination essays. The updated prompts are below, and each will have an 800-character limit:
Explain how the student embodies the philosophies of Gracious Professionalism ® and Coopertition ® through the FIRST Core Values: Discovery, Innovation, Impact, Inclusion, Teamwork and Fun. Please provide examples.
How has the student increased the awareness of FIRST? Describe the student’s interests and/or plans to continue to engage with FIRST beyond high school. Please provide examples.
How does the student’s individual contribution to the team benefit the whole? Please provide examples.
Describe the students’ experience in areas of STEM. This could include but is not limited to skills in engineering, software, CAD, fabrication, etc. Please provide examples.
Explain the student’s leadership to their fellow team members. How do they motivate others? What is their leadership style? Please provide examples.
New! We’ve added a section for additional comments about the student with a 500-character limit:
Please share anything else you would like us to know about the student, including academic performance, specialized skills, or additional extracurricular activities.
Additionally:
We have removed the “Academic Excellence” field from the nomination, as it has been incorporated into the new additional comments prompt outlined above.
We have removed the optional photo submission from the nomination form
As a friendly reminder, submissions for the Dean’s List Award open at 12pm Noon ET on November 3, 2023! Please consider nominating your eligible students for this award, as the recognition and validation students receive upon being nominated is invaluable.
For more details on the Dean’s List Award, please check out the Submitted Awards webpage. The updated Dean’s List Award Guide will be available on the Submitted Awards page soon!
I strongly disagree with the emphasis in these new guidelines on continued engagement with FIRST beyond high school. Students should be allowed to use the program as a launchpad into the STEM field and should be strongly encouraged to focus their time and energy on progressing their career after graduation, whether that be by going directly into industry or going to college. The idea that a student with outstanding past and current leadership contributions to their team should be excluded from getting an award celebrating that achievement because they are not willing to commit to continuing to volunteer after graduation is outlandish, especially when most students have no idea what their life will look like years in the future and even the most sincere commitment is likely to crumble in the face of the many unknown challenges post-high school life brings.
Also, this is yet another award that has been converted from being a celebration of contributions toward one’s team and broader community to a “what can you do for US FIRST” award.
But it is a reinforcement of it. Irrelevant of how it came to be it really seems inappropriate to me. I had really hoped it would be better with the award criteria being reviewed.
I mean this with no disrespect. But I find most future plans essays of high school seniors to be mostly fantasy. Even when sincere. I think largely what happens is the universe is a lot more diverse and has bigger challenges then they ever been exposed to. Ideally they learn to dream bigger. One of the best parts of First (When it works right) is that it encourages that sort of thinking.
All the other questions ask about what the student has done or is currently doing with their teams. These make it really easy to write about great student leaders who have gone to many events, created value in their teams, and have made measurable contributions; it also makes it easy to compare different nominees based on what they’ve accomplished so far.
Only the FIRST awareness question asks about what a student plans to do in the future, and asks you to write about things that haven’t happened yet. It becomes a lot more gray when this could be an ideal dream or potential plan that could be diverted due to any number of reasons. This is a lot more difficult to compare two students who may have done similar things for their teams, but one has a much more grandiose idea of what they could do post graduation than the other.
I wonder if they discussed changing the name of this award.
It’s a pun… not even a particularly good one. I’ve talked to quite a few college recruiters and they honestly have no idea what this is short of them knowing about FIRST already. It makes giving them a soundbite for it harder than it should be. “FIRST STEM Allstars!” or “FIRST Future leaders” are some generic but also more descriptive names. You do you though FIRST.
Look, I get the pun, it’s named after one of the founders but also… it’s not really doing what they want outside of the schools that already have some partnership/emphasis with FIRST. No college recruiters are digging into this - they are looking at it as “this student made the Dean’s List? Via nomination?” and moving on with confusion…
I guess the changes are good. They seem like small steps in the right direction. As others have said - would be nice to see more and I’m optimistic that will happen… eventually.
The whole nominees vs winners vs champs winners needed a naming resolution also that better suited for applications.
I was less concerned about the non-academic pathways inclusion which the award doesn’t make a big difference for. We never considered future plans when nominating before.
Our biggest problem seems to be delayed achievers. That nominating only sophomores or juniors they haven’t achieved their leadership potential always. If academic paths aren’t a focus they should go ahead and open it to seniors. Or find some better way.
As a Dean’s List Winner from 2023, I have a lot of opinions on this, and strongly believe it should be a Junior award (while sophomores are technically able to win it, the award heavily favors juniors – not a single sophomore won it this year.)
In my opinion, DLA being for juniors is good for a few reasons:
College Applications. The name is still a bit terrible and when applying I still have to/would recommend putting the addendum of (10 of 65,000+) or (170? of 65,000+) but having an international level award for college applications is game changing. Also, a surprisingly high number of college’s I’ve talked to have heard and know about what the award is.
Team sustainability. I believe team leaders in their senior years should prioritize passing down knowledge to their team, rather than “CADing and making the craziest thing possible”. One is good for sustainability. The other is good for one year. By making the award for those with free-er Senior Schedules, it would further incentivize this practice which in my opinion is maybe not a good thing.
There’s a bit here in this change that I like, but I still do not believe this fully pushes the needle to where I would like it to be for the Dean’s List Award, which is that it should be agnostic of subteam choice. In previous years, the wording of questions 3 and 4 meant to win levels of the award, one would be pushed to be a Technical Subteam Lead, however those in more business/outreach/operations roles, would be disadvantaged. Not much of this is changed through changing the questions
Old:
How does the student’s individual contribution to the team benefit the team as a whole in the areas of fundraising, outreach, entrepreneurship, and creativity? Please provide examples.
Describe the student’s technical expertise, using specific examples in the areas of programming, electronics, design, fabrication, making, illustrating how these skills have contributed to the team’s success. Please provide examples.
to
Things about this that I like is it moves away from the words technical expertise, and no longer encourages Jacks of All Trades. On the other hand, I still think this award does a great disservice to those on non-technical subteams. FIRST is more than robots, but this award, like many teams and something we are still working to change on ours, still treats operations-based subteams as lesser in importance.
I do however, welcome the change from the wording of Technical Expertise to STEM Experience, which broadens what is considered under the term.
Completely agree. Reading the first half of the blog post about how they were putting less focus on the college/university aspect, I was really hoping to read that they were going to go back to allowing any student to be nominated.
as a dean’s list semi-finalist from North Shore this year, lemme drop my two cents on this one:
Removing the Academic Excellence piece from its own separate line is a HUGE boon to some kids, since even though their grades may not be superb they can still show fantastic leadership on their respective teams.
The “additional comments” piece is also huge because if someone shows leadership elsewhere like in sports or another extracurricular that can also help their case in how they show leadership.
The one problem with this is that seniors will have the edge over juniors and sophomores like juniors have now. also makes the field much more competitive and harder to decipher who has the better skills over another person
I don’t see the problem in it being more competitve. I guess with the above name suggestion maybe the award is trying to do too much and needs split into a couple awards. The FIRST STEM All-Stars (any student eligible) and the FIRST Academic Team (Juniors and Sophomores). Can’t apply for both and once you’ve won one, can’t apply for the other.
When it comes to this item, I think the key is at the end - please provide examples. I’ve always used this as an opportunity to promote the student’s experience and passion for outreach and mentoring. Focus on what they’ve done and how that points towards the future. If they’ve spent time mentoring an FLL/FTCFIRST Tech Challenge team, highlight that activity here, as it points towards a future as an adult mentor. If they go to competition and help other teams program their autonomous routine, talk about that and how they would make a great CSAControl System Advisor helping teams. As far as prompts go, I think this one really does give you a fair amount of room to answer in a way that highlights your candidates strengths without having to do any real stretching.
Quick disclaimer, I’ve not been overly involved in Dean’s list nominations in the past on my teams, so my knowledge on the past process/eligibility is limited.
Considering the choice to start pushing the STEAM acronym again for the 2024 season, I’m disappointed to see such a focus on purely STEM in these updates.
Our nominee last season was a fantastic student who’m I am quite proud was representing themselves and our team at the district championships. They also had virtually zero STEM related skills/background, yet were the backbone to most of our team’s funding, buisness and media operations.
The focus on STEM makes amazing students like our nominee last year less eligible, and in a program with the slogan “more than robots”, reiterates the thought some people have that buisness, media, outreach and other non-technical roles are “less-than” compared to a technical role.
The thought that @ngreen mentions of potentially dissolving this award into multiple different awards seems like an interesting avenue worth considering.
I also agree with @marshall that we need a name change here; Just like the former “Chairman’s Award”, renamed the now “Impact Award” for clarity.
I’m a 2012 winner and also against the “what will they do for FIRST beyond high school” question. I think asking about what they would like to do after high school is fine. But leave it up to them on how they will make an impact on FIRST, STEM, their college, or themselves. But FIRST probably understands what they are doing with that prompt, and since it’s a hypothetical, I encourage teams to tell them what they want to hear.
And if academics isn’t the main point anymore, then seniors should be allowed again. Let the most outstanding student leaders be nominated.
There may be some factors, not apparent to many, that shape the FIRST Dean’s List Award and its criteria. The topics discussed in this thread are influenced by these factors.
I mean… maybe… but the whole point of the blog post was to say “These are the factors we considered, and these were the results of considering them”. Are you implying FIRST was purposefully withholding their real motivations from teams? Or trying to make us guess at it?
I get it if you’re trying to point out that “we don’t know everything”, and I agree. But that’s not a reason not to discuss what was provided. And doesn’t add anything - at the end of the day, I’m still using the blog post to decide what to write. Perceived reality is reality, and what I perceive is what FIRST wrote in their blog post.
The inclusion of “Commitment to FIRST” is logical if the institution wants to reward its best people and encourage them to stick around. I don’t fault them for including it. But it also does mean that the nominations won’t actually highlight the best students, it’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor highlight the best students who wanna keep doing FIRST.
For my own mentoring, I’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor continue to teach students to critically analyze their community and their current stage in life, and decide how to best spend their time for maximum impact. If that involves FIRST, great. But it shouldn’t be assumed. Rather, alumni should assume the principles and values of the program are what are universally applicable.
FIRST and I don’t celebrate exactly the same things. And that’s ok.
