nan | 楠木

    Debate day!

    We were moved up to the third match up, because Xinjiang Province changed their topic and were last to debate. This was not bad news; the two match ups before us did not offer any excitement, and we were the first strong team to appear on stage.

    Our topic as the Against side: college students should not do part-time jobs. Not very easy to argue, since I myself believe in the opposite. Anyway, I prepared a careful opening statement, which I delivered quite well. I couldn’t help making some changes on the spot, and that affected the overall power of the statement, but still it was effective.

    Then free debate. The For side opened fire on us with some quite heavy ammo; but we were well prepared. Our second debater, a girl from Beijing Industrial University, did magnificiently. And to sum things up my fellow student from Tsinghua, the girl made a great summary. She complained afterwards that she was way too nervous and messed things up, but I assured her we all did great.

    And so we did. In the closing ceremony in the afternoon, we had won the following: first prize for being 1 of the top 5 debating teams; 2 of us were of the 10 best debaters; and most importantly we won the coveted best debating team!

    For each of those prizes we were awarded a crystal cup, a gold medal and a certificate each. I also had a set of those for my speech competition results, so I had 4 sets of those beautiful crystal cups. Not bad for a few days work, huh?

    But most of all I’m happy that I won those debating prizes for Beijing and Tsinghua. That really makes me feel good.

    After the awarding, there was a brilliant show by the students of Heilongjiang Institute of Science & Technology. I was especially impressed with the girl who sang "I will always love you". It was as if Whitney Houston was performing live!

    Anyway, what a beautiful day. Going back to Beijing tomorrow. Can’t wait to show the guys at home these trophies.