Student Essay Awards

2012 Student Essay Competition winners

2011 Student Essay Competition winners

2013 Helen H. Glaser Student Essay Awards

Purpose
Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society instituted this competition to encourage medical students to write creative narratives or scholarly essays relevant to medicine.

Prizes
$2000 first, $750 second, $500 third, and honorable mention awards of $250 each. Prizes will be paid after the receipt of required documentation (see Requirements for Winning Essays, below).

Eligibility
Authors must be enrolled at medical schools with active AΩA chapters (Class of 2013 or later), but need not be members of AΩA. Only one entry may be submitted by each student.

Dates
Entries must be sent by online form or e-mail (jane@alphaomegaalpha.org) no later than January 31, 2013. Winners will be announced no later than May 1, 2013.

Requirements for Essays

1. Essays must be written while the student is in medical school, must be the work of a single author, and must represent original work.
2. The essay may be on any nontechnical subject related to medicine. Well-referenced, scholarly essays will be given preference.
3. The essay must not exceed 15 double-spaced pages of 12-point type with minimum 1-inch margins, exclusive of reference listing. The author's name and essay title must be on each page, and all pages must be numbered.
4. Unique references, numbered consecutively, are limited to 20. (Reference citation of web sites is not acceptable unless a site is the sole source of the information or has official academic credentials. Examples of acceptable sites are official government web pages such as that of the National Institutes of Health.)
5. The paper must not have been offered to or published by any other journal or entered in any other contest and must be submitted to The Pharos, the official publication of AΩA, which has the right of first refusal.
6. If the essay is submitted by e-mail, the following information must accompany the essay on a separate page (or fill out the checklist attached to the announcement) or in the body of the e-mail: Author's full name, address, phone number, e-mail address, name of medical school and year of graduation, and essay title.
7. Essays not meeting all requirements will be rejected.
8. A committee of the editorial board of The Pharos will review the essays and select the winners. Judging will be on the basis of originality, scholarship, style and composition, and relevance.

Requirements for Winning Essays
When notified of award receipt, authors of all winning papers must provide documentation of references in photocopy as follows: title pages of all books cited; the first and last pages of book chapters cited; the table of contents of the particular issue of the journal in which a cited article appeared; all quotations, from the primary sources, including page numbers.

Essays Not Receiving an Award
Essays may be revised and submitted for standard review for publication in The Pharos. Papers not accepted for The Pharos but published elsewhere should include the following acknowledgment: Submitted as an entry in the 2013 Alpha Omega Alpha Student Essay Competition.

More Information
Contact Jane Kimball at (650) 329-0291 or jane@alphaomegaalpha.org.

Sample Student Essays and Poetry (PDF)

Download the announcement and checklist (MS Word Document)

Online Submission
Submit an Essay for Consideration