How to play in a tournament with unbalanced pay?

[Pitr]

It's not quite winner take all, but later this week I'll be in a tournament with ~30 people. It's a freeroll from a points series. The winner takes 40k + a WSOP final event seat, second gets 12.5k, third 4k, and it drops at a more reasonable rate from there down to 10th getting 300 dollars. Anything from fourth up would be a major deal for me, and each place above that a bigger deal, Ranging from paying for school for a semister to a year to paying for the rest of it to making me a very happy person. Are there any adjustments to my play I should make to deal with the wonky payout scale? (And I'm not really going to complain; the tournament amounts to around a $2200 entry and I won money over the course of the points series)