What I learned from not being shortlisted for an Outstanding Individual Award
The criteria tell you who is eligible. Previous winners’ profiles can tell you who is likely to win.
I recently applied for Université Laval’s Bourse Personnalité (Outstanding Individual award). I was not selected—or even shortlisted.
Congratulations are due to the students whose candidacies were recognized. Their projects clearly made a strong impression, and being selected in a university-wide competition is a significant achievement.
The result may not be the one I had hoped for, but I do not regret applying. My candidacy was built around several years of involvement in student scholarly publishing, particularly my work as editor-in-chief of the Actes des Journées de linguistique in 2024 and 2025. The project was substantial enough that I believed I had a realistic chance. That, in itself, was a sufficient reason to submit an application.
Editorial work as student involvement
My application focused on the work required to improve the production of the JDL conference proceedings: coordinating authors and editors, carrying out developmental editing, managing the publication platform, and trying to make the process faster and more predictable. For the 2024 proceedings, six articles were published before the end of the conference year, and the nine-manuscript volume was completed by May 2025. I then returned as editor-in-chief for the 2025 volume.
Editorial work often succeeds by disappearing into the final product. When an edited volume is published, readers see the finished articles. They do not see the exchanges with authors, the restructuring of manuscripts, the technical problems, or the many small decisions required to keep a volunteer publication project moving.
Looking more closely at previous recipients
One lesson from the application is that the formal eligibility criteria do not necessarily reveal which kinds of candidacies are most competitive.
Competitions develop their own culture over time. The students recognized in the Personnalité category at the 2025 Gala de la vie étudiante provide a useful illustration.
Their involvement included establishing shared refrigerators on campus, relaunching an association supporting sexual and gender diversity, creating free clothing assistance, representing international students, organizing interprogram activities and charitable fundraising, offering public-speaking courses, and founding a radio program devoted to legal and cultural issues.
These are varied and clearly worthwhile forms of involvement. They also share qualities that make their effects comparatively easy to see and communicate: identifiable communities, public activities, concrete services, and an immediate social dimension.
The contributions of editorial work are distributed and slow to surface. They improve manuscripts, support student authors, preserve student research, and strengthen part of the university’s scholarly infrastructure. That kind of impact is genuine, but it may not be the easiest to evaluate in a competition where a clear social narrative helps a candidacy land.
This does not indicate a flaw in the selection process. It does, however, reveal something useful about the culture of the competition and the kinds of achievement it has tended to recognize.
Understanding that distinction is not a reason to be discouraged. It is a reason to go in with accurate expectations.
Apply—but be strategic with your time
None of this changes my view that the application was worth making.
It is easy to disqualify oneself in advance, particularly when a competition is selective or when one’s work does not resemble the most visible examples of student involvement. An applicant does not need to know that they will win. They need only have a credible case and a realistic possibility of being selected.
At the same time, applications require time, and academic work already involves constant decisions about where that time is best spent. The profiles of previous recipients can help with that decision. They reveal not only who has succeeded, but also which forms of involvement a competition is especially well suited to recognize.
That kind of research is worth doing before you commit to an application—not to talk yourself out of applying, but to go in with accurate expectations and to make an informed decision about whether the opportunity is well matched to your work.
The criteria tell you whether you are eligible. Previous recipients’ profiles help you judge whether preparing the application is a smart use of your time.