S&D and Your College App
So how good do local speech and debate tournament trophies look on college applications? Eh they are pretty decent, better than your varsity sport. I mean come on, its essentially academics, but fun! To really hit the gold, you have to travel nationally. Colleges don’t know exactly what a “Mountain View High School Lincoln Douglas Finalist” really is, and probably do not understand the specifics of a “Harvard Invitational Lincoln Douglas Octafinalist”.One thing is certain though, “Harvard anything” sounds a heck of a lot better than the unknown Mountain View school. You may ask to yourself, “How am I ever going to get a trophy at Harvard, or Berkeley, or Stanford, or Yale???” While, freshman and sophomore debaters are able to sign up for JV division in debate and juniors and seniors must sign up for varsity. There is a great disparity between the competition in JV and Varsity. If you are truly dedicated to the cause, no matter what school you are from, you can make the top 64 of 300 at Harvard or Berkeley at least in JV. And guess what, each of those 64 will get something.
If you are one of those people who want to dedicate yourself to one or two extracurricular activities and want to be insanely good at them, then speech and debate is your ticket. Just think about how amazing any application would look if it read, Harvard Invitational Octafinalist, Yale Invitational Semifinalist, and Stanford Invitational Quarterfinalist. You get the idea.
This article was written by Xi Lin
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