Peyton Bristow
Your college years are a contact sport. You’re jumping hurdles for A’s, doing backflips for internships and trying to tackle making social connections that will last you a lifetime. Layer on competing in formalized contests, and you take that exercise from an intramural league at MizzouRec to starting on Faurot Field.
Graduate students train for the Three Minute Thesis, walking away with professional development money and a shot at a regional competition. Undergraduates present posters and speeches at the campus Research and Creative Achievements forum and budding entrepreneurs spend weeks in Trulaske College of Business pitch competitions that have produced tens of thousands in shared prize money.
Universities have good reasons to run these contests and the University of Missouri is no exception. Winners give the school press-ready headlines and tangible bragging rights that feed recruitment and alumni pride. The Missouri School of Journalism’s repeated success in national competitions like the Hearst Journalism Awards is a clear example of institutional payoff: it’s a story the school can promote to prospective students and donors.
For competition winners, the reward doesn’t automatically launch them into a successful career. Success in a competition is a hopeful spark that often fizzles out, amounting to a dusty trophy or a single line on a resume. While competitions teach useful skills and offer practical experience, piling so much of a student’s time and emotional labor into one major moment of judgment comes with its costs.
Recent research in educational psychology from the National Library of Medicine on competition-induced anxiety measured effects on attention, cognitive load and performance. The data showed that short, high-stakes contests can make people more stressed and their resultant performance worse.
When Mizzou asks students to compete, who actually benefits, and at what expense? The university gets an occasional headline; a few select students get meaningful financial or career windfalls, while the majority invest weeks or semesters into projects that will be judged over the course of a single afternoon in a dull conference room with stale donuts.
The payoff distribution is lopsided enough that it deserves a closer look.
There’s no denying that awards can add some flash to your resume and make LinkedIn connections envious. Whether the line reads “winner,” “outstanding participant,” or “runner-up,” that resume bullet carries an irrefutable shine. On the other hand, so does serving as a club president, presenting research at a conference or simply working a demanding part-time job while carrying a full course load. Employers often care less about which award you won and more about the broader story your experiences tell.
Take the Three Minute Thesis competition. Graduate students spend months condensing years of research into a 180-second pitch that’s judged on clarity, delivery and impact. The top performers may advance to regional competitions and snag some professional development funding. But winning is rare, with countless institutions across the globe competing each year and very few advancing past regional competitions.
A loss like that isn’t just a surface wound; it’s a deep sting that can feel like an outright dismissal of their research. After all, when a student’s life’s work fails to impress in three minutes, it can feel as if no one will ever bother with the full corpus. The thought is irrational – no loss can make your research worthless – but too often that’s exactly the message students internalize.
Undergraduate students face a similar bind with the Show Me Research Week. Students are encouraged to present posters and projects. While the practice is valuable, judging in a contest like this can be highly subjective. A poster that wows one reviewer will fall flat with another, and the difference between an award and a polite thank you can come down to quirks in a judge’s taste.
Competing sounds glamorous because we often frame it around winners. Headlines celebrate the student who clinched a national prize or the team that hauled in a check. But for most students, competition means hours of effort distilled into a single presentation, performance or submission, with success or failure decided in the span of mere minutes.
Unlike your typical college course, there’s no partial credit or guardian angel grading curve, just a binary outcome: you win or you lose. Because competitions highlight winners and rarely even give feedback to the rest, the other students walk away with little more than an email that amounts to “better luck next year.”
If most students leave the stage empty-handed, the few who do win must take home more than bragging rights – right?
Winning is supposed to be the endgame, your golden ticket. Journalism students who take home a Hearst Journalism Award, often dubbed the Pulitzer Prize of college journalism, have an endorsement that will turn heads in newsrooms around the country. To the journalism school, Hearst wins are more than bragging rights; they’re the closest thing to proof that Mizzou’s legacy of excellence still carries weight nationally.
But Hearst winners face a sobering reality: the journalism industry, among most others, continues to shrink, and even prestigious awards can’t guarantee job offers in a market defined by layoffs and instability. The glory of victory seems to fade quickly when an industry can’t even absorb its best and brightest.
And yet, to write student contests off as meaningless would be unfair. The mere act of competing can still sharpen skills and build confidence, with or without a trophy. Winning deserves applause, but so does the simple act of competing.
Every student who enters an extracurricular competition has already gone above and beyond what’s required in the classroom. To treat only the winners as worthy of acknowledgement is to overlook the competitors who put their work on the line and walked away empty-handed. Participation trophies have long lost any sort of value, even to those on the receiving end of them – so what’s the solution?
Maybe it’s time to ask whether a single judged moment is really the best way to measure student talent. If competitions are meant to foster growth, then every participant deserves something more than a perfunctory rejection. They deserve feedback that helps them improve. Even brief, constructive notes would transform the experience for a crushing pass/fail verdict into a true learning opportunity.
Mizzou’s Show Me Research Week deserves credit for building feedback into the process, with judges providing mentors and presenters comments after final judging. That model should be the rule, not the exception. If contests are truly an opportunity for learning, every competitor deserves guidance on how to grow.
Of course, this requires more time and effort from judges who are often faculty or professionals with full workloads. But if universities are going to promote these competitions as a central feature of a student’s development, they owe it to students to make the process educational, not just exclusionary.
Feedback is the oxygen of growth, and withholding it turns these contests into hollow showcases for winners rather than meaningful learning experiences for all. If universities want to champion competition, they have to do more than crown victors: they need to invest in the development of everyone brave enough to compete.
Edited by Ash Merenbloom | [email protected]
Copy edited by Isabelle Zavila and Emma Harper | [email protected]
Edited by Chase Pray | [email protected]