Business Professionals of America » Service Programs » The Torch Awards Program » Role of the Student

Role of the Student

A student is responsible for building his/her Torch résumé through the Online Torch Awards System. Each member should read through the activity list in this handbook, plan activities, carry them out, and log into the Torch Awards Online System to add the activities to their résumé themselves. Students should then respond accordingly to their advisor’s/reviewer’s comments on their activities and ensure that the advisor/local reviewer submits the résumé through the online system by the appropriate deadline.

Students must get their Member IDs and passwords from their advisor. Students can change their Torch Award password (or set their password, if their advisors left password fields blank) by going to http://www.bpa.org/awards/changepass

Each activity added in the online system has one of the seven Torch categories and an activity attached to it. The student must also list the date of the activity and must write a description of the activity to add it to the résumé. Activity descriptions should start with action verbs.


Rules for Résumés and Résumé Activities

  1. A Torch Award Résumé counts for the span of a BPA member’s membership in a division (Middle Level, Secondary or Post-secondary). Therefore, a student can have activities from multiple years, but only as long as the activities occurred while the student was a member of that BPA division. Points cannot be counted from before the student was a member, and points cannot be carried over from one division to the next.
  2. Students can keep adding to their résumé from year to year within a division until they earn an Ambassador Award. Once an Ambassador Award is earned, all subsequent activities begin a new Torch résumé. (Advisors can import activities for students from the previous year by using the Torch import functions in the Membership Registration System.)
  3. Students may earn only one Ambassador Award per year, but could earn multiple Ambassador Awards over the course of a multi-year BPA membership. Activities from one Ambassador résumé cannot be counted towards the next résumé.
  4. Each activity or project during a school year may be claimed only once; major projects may be broken into smaller segments.
  5. Points cannot be documented until the activity has been completed.
  6. Each activity has a limit on the number of times it can be used on one résumé. This number is listed in parentheses at the end of each activity explanation in the list of activities in this handbook. The Torch Award Online System will not allow additional instances of that activity.
  7. Each activity’s description should start with an action verb.
  8. Activity description spelling and grammar must be correct.


(For more details on using the Torch Award Online System, click here.)