TUMB Banquet Awards Process

I thought it might be a good idea to document the process we use for the TUMB Banquet Awards in an effort to promote transparency and an understanding of how awards are chosen.  The process is something that evolved over the first few years of the banquet but has held steady for the past several years.  The process is subject to future tweaks if I feel it’s necessary, but i’m pretty comfortable with the system that we have set in place.

Full Service Awards are awarded to members that will have completed eight semesters in the TUMB by the end of that academic year.

Extended Service Awards are awarded to members that will have completed over eight semesters in the TUMB by the end of that academic year.

Outstanding Section Member Awards: The student leadership (section leaders and drum majors) are given a list of the TUMB membership minus themselves broken down by section.  They all vote independently against that list, and the majority votes win for each section.

KKY Awards: The entire KKY Rho Chapter discusses the potential candidates and decides via committee who receives the awards; for the senior award, all seniors in KKY are excluded from the discussion.

Outstanding First Year Member, Section of the Year, and Spirit Award:

The TUMB staff (including the Shockwave and Color Guard contractors) individually picks two Section of the Year nominees and three Outstanding First Year Member and Spirit Award nominees to be considered for the award.  Those get compiled into a new poll where the staff then votes independently on their first and second choice for all awards.

Any first choice vote earns 5 points and any second choice vote earns 3 points.  The highest point total wins the award.  This process has created at times a rare result where an individual with no first place votes has won the award (when the first place choices are diverse but the second place choices are very narrow).

Director Award: The Director of Bands requests from the TUMB staff a list of up to three nominees for the Director Award.  From that list, he handpicks the award recipient.