In The Minds of Contest Judges

Contest Judges will know your:

1. ability - how you rate on their standards
2. knowledge - how broad your understanding about the subject is
   
3. creativity - how you compose your thoughts to make it interesting for them

If you have what it takes to know what they're thinking, you can easily get their admiration. You can be one of their favorites and they'll expect more from you once you've already made a good impression for them.

There are no difficult topics when you are adoptable and resilient with the topics being laid out. Reading a lot of topics can be helpful once you enter a competition, like:

• extemporaneous speech - that you must develop under a very limited time, let's say 3 to 5 minutes.
• poster making - where you can interpret the topic according to your own understanding in a limited time, too!
• quiz bee - that can truly test how wide your vocabulary and knowledge about certain things.
• essay writing - where you can expound a simple or general topic into something spectacular and interesting subject.

If you have the guts and all the confidence in the world, you can enter such contests while your in school or even out of the academe.

There are lots of opportunities online that will require mostly your literary expertise. HubPages is one of them. From time to time, the HP staff always encourage hubbers to participate and contribute a more original and creative hubs that will not only promote the site but will attract more readers worldwide.

Judging a contest is both good and bad news to me. Good because it can be exciting but bad because it's tedious. I've been invited to judge various contests, ranging from school contests and our town's beauty pageant. It's draining the gray matter of my brain.

You'll meet your fellow judges and you'll compare yourself (silently) with them while the emcee read all your resumes. I asked myself (silently, again!): "What am I doing here?"

Well, to appease the organizers, I always replied positively to their invitation because it will be an added experience to me even it can worsen my migraine. It will be an insult to decline such invite which can enrich my knowledge on things that I didn't explore yet.

My college years were concentrated not only in studies but also radio works and community participation. The latter played a lot during the said period in the life of this hubber.

As a judge:

1. Judging the works of high school students in journalism  refreshed my mind when I also  experienced such contest.
2. Literary and musical contests delved on speeches (extemporaneous, oration and elocution) plus those songs (vocal solo, vocal duet) and dances (folk and modern) that tested the well-rounded personality of this hubber.
3. Beauty contest is usually dubbed as "money contest" due to the financial demand that a contestant will spend on gowns and accessories, etc. Eyes will feast on the physical attributes of the contestants but once the Q&A comes, your admiration will depreciate as each contender voices out their opinion.
4. Poster contests can be tricky. The play of colors, the balance and the interpretation of each artist can sometime fool a judge. You must really have a knowledge in the art in order to avoid such inconvenience.
5. Online judging is upon the invitation of this hubber's friends. Let's say a photo contest on Facebook; you will just like the site or the photo, then your name will register on the user's account. You cannot fool them if you really participated.
   

Aside from the literary, musical, beauty contests we frequently see, there are lots of activities that most people can be occupied with and at the same time earn accolades as well. To mention a few here:

• sports and fitness competition -bodybuilding and fitness sports both for male and female
  
• cooking contest - one of the most viewed competition on television
  
• reality contest - ever been to a Big Brother's house, or lose your weight at Big Loser? (Our province, Camarines Sur, is now a favorite location site of the foreign versions of Survivor series. The exact location is the Caramoan peninsula with famous white sand Gota beach.)

Without the help of these judges, the organizer will be having a hard time declaring a winner.