At the beginning of July, members of the SolBridge Debate Society attended two workshops, one in Ningbo (China) and the other in Hong Kong. SDS is one of the most popular clubs in SolBridge, yet not many people are aware what they actually do while they are out of the country. 

Usually they go for competitions and tournaments, but during vacation, they attend workshops to get trained by famous coaches and debaters to enhance and complement their training. The following is an experience description by one of the SolBridge debaters who attended the last China Debate Camp.

After a few hours of sleep, SDS members started the first day. The whole workshop started with famous debaters’ demonstration debate. Each one of them is a champion of certain international tournaments, and it made every student all the more excited. We shared our opinions about the debate and voted which team won. In the afternoon, we had several practice debate rounds. This is for estimating the trainees’ level, so that they can put them into certain classes. As a result, all of the SDS members were assigned into the advanced group except newbie debaters. Before the actual tournaments when every student competes with each other, everyone got several sessions from the assigned coach. The class exercises varied from one coach to the next. Some coaches made the class listen to the world’s championship debate video and analyze it; other coaches gave lectures about certain topics such as feminism, the current Middle East dispute, or US politics. However, every class got chance to do practice debate rounds once or twice a day.

Although these schedules sound intense already, it was far from being over. After the assigned coaches’ exercises, we also chose 2 to 3 elective courses taught by other coaches, about certain topics that listed above or techniques like ‘how to point out logical fallacy?’, ‘how to ask Point of Information* strategically?’, ‘how to use preparation time effectively?’ and so on. Indeed, these sessions and direct communication with famous debaters helped all of us to learn and grow as a debater and also as a potential educator for next newbie debaters.

The tournament finally came after 5 days of intense training. Some of the SDS members teamed up with each other, and some of them teamed up with local Chinese students. We as SolBridge students were rather famous, because of the senior debaters from SDS accomplished excellent result, and we have well-known competent judges. In this workshop, our members contributed to the reputation by making great result. Not only newbie members proceeded to semi-final round, which means new members who were trained in our school for a semester beat almost all of the Chinese teams, but also 4 of the members went to the grand final round against Chinese national team. Those 4 members are also trained less than a year or even a semester, but got one of the best scores out of all of the participants. After the final round, a lot of Chinese local students approached us and asked for our contacts and taking pictures with them. As representative members of SolBridge and in a bigger picture, Korea, SDS members made a great success.

By Yoowon Kim.