Nationals: Preparing Students/Entries

Affiliate coordinators play an important part in preparing their students to participate in the National Contest. At minimum, you must prepare your delegation by:

• Distributing materials about the national contest to your top two entries. At minimum, this includes information from NHD. Most delegations will include additional information specific to their Affiliate's participation.

• Advancing entries as national qualifiers. The National Office will send instructions on how to submit a list or advance entries through zFairs. This usually needs to be completed ASAP after your Affiliate contest.

• Monitoring student registrations. The registration process allows students to officially enter their NHD project into the National Contest. The list that you send earlier merely alerts the National Office of the entries that qualify. By completing registration, students finish the process and thus, their entries are added to the schedule. Students also use this process to sign up for housing/ meals, self-nominate for special prizes and scholarships, indicate their likely attendance at special events, and other things, such as paying for a handling label if they are sending an exhibit or performance props to College Park.

  • Parents: Through a student’s registration, parents provide permissions and agree to waivers. Parents do not need to register on their own or pay any fees for themselves.

  • Alerting alternate entries. Work with students and NHD as any national qualifiers decline to participate and advance/notify alternate entries.

• Monitoring teacher registrations. If attending the contest, teachers also must register their attendance and for housing/meals, workshops, etc. Teachers are assessed a fee, which partly covers the cost of the teacher bag full of goodies they will receive at registration.  Teachers who do not need housing/meals or do not want to attend workshops do not need to register, but they will not receive a teacher bag.

National Qualifier Packet

Many Affiliate coordinators prepare packets of information to distribute to national qualifiers and their teachers. You can hand these materials out as students walk across stage, immediately afterwards during a national qualifier meeting, or distribute them via email. Whatever you decide, try to get the information to students and teachers as soon as possible so they can begin to prepare for their participation in the contest.

At minimum, you will want to include the information that NHD shares with you about the contest, including the National Contest schedule and  information about registration. Participants often want more information, so many Affiliates prepare a program-specific supplement that talks about the contest, transportation, shirts, buttons, and communication plans. The following are samples of national qualifier packets from various Affiliate programs. 

National Qualifier Meeting

Immediately after the Affiliate contest awards ceremony, host a meeting with all national qualifying students, teachers and parents. If possible, coordinators can host a live webinar or record a webinar to review the information below with their participants prior to the national contest.  

The national qualifier meeting should cover the following information: 

• Congratulate Qualifiers: They represent the best of the best, and the National Contest will be the icing on the cake of their NHD experience.

• Hand out the National Qualifier packets: Hand out and go over the important materials in your national qualifier packet. This , most importantly, includes registration information. NHD will send all Affiliate coordinators (February - March) a PDF of the National Contest Registration Guide for coordinators to print and handout during the national qualifier meeting. There will be a detailed guide and a one-page summary of key information and deadlines.

• Explain the Registration Process: Share registration deadline and review procedures for registration, and project submission in categories that need to be submitted in advance.

• Be Upfront about Costs and Fundraising: Explain all possible costs associated with the contest, and what your organization may be covering (if anything). Share fundraising tips and strategies that have worked in the past for your national qualifiers. 

• Discuss Dorm and Hotel Options: Encourage participants to stay on campus and discuss how roommates will be assigned. Coordinators are encouraged to organize their Affiliate dorm room assignment or the University of Maryland can organize after registration is closed. 

• Overview Schedule: Review the National Contest schedule and encourage participants to arrive mid-Sunday afternoon so that they can pick up critical information in on-site registration and attend the Welcome Ceremony

• Explain the Competitive Level: Convey to students, teachers, and parents that the best entries from every Affiliate will compete against one another at the National Contest and that, just as at the Affiliate contest, most participants will not be called to the stage to receive a medal or prize. Students may even receive feedback that seems to be more critical than what they have received at the regional and/or affiliate contests.

• Get them Excited about Buttons and T-Shirts: Affiliate Promotion -- Explain how can participants pick up their Affiliate buttons, t-shirts and explain the process of “button trading.”  

• Discuss Affiliate-Specific Activities and Your Role: Explain any assistance that you will provide, gatherings that you will host, how they can reach you while at the contest, etc.;

• Set Participant Expectations and Behavior Guidelines: Review your Affiliate’s expectations and guidelines for participants’ behavior at the National Contest. Make sure to express that National History Day is about self-improvement and skill-building and not a way to define success only by receiving a medal or prize.

NHD will provide you with more information on how to monitor the registrations of students and teachers from your delegation. NHD counts on coordinators, who know the students and teachers personally, to double-check that they are registered correctly and by the deadline. Watch for updates from the National Office on how to help!

Don't forget that if you are staying in the dorms, you will need to register for housing, too!

After your contest, national qualifiers can revise and improve their entries before the National Contest. Your assistance will be greatly appreciated and, unlike before your contest, you’ll be able to provide it without any appearance of impropriety. As long as you offer your assistance equally to all of the advancing students, you can feel free to offer as much as possible. 

A national qualifiers’ workshop can be held at a particular location, several locations, virtually, or any combination of these, depending upon your budget, time, and distances to be traveled. In addition to assisting with a careful review of the feedback from your judges, you can encourage students to critique one another’s work. If the students can’t physically assemble in one place, consider reviewing only the process papers via electronic means. You could even ask colleagues to carefully review the students’ projects. Feel free to be blunt with the students about everything they could do in order to be competitive at the National Contest. These workshops can be very valuable experiences, helping students to gain experience with critiquing their own work as well as that of their peers.