Activities: Speech & Debate

Full disclosure: I am an active member of Premier Distinction of the National Speech and Debate Association but this is not a thing I am doing for them.

Your school’s speech team gives you an excellent opportunity to showcase your intellectual curiosity by talking about whatever you want to adults while earning points with an academically recognized honor society.

If you can align what you are researching and presenting to how you are positioning your college applications, this creates an amazingly favorable signal for you. You will look like the sort of high-initiative student who is eager to do research and willing to present it at conferences to boost your university’s academic reputation (regardless of them fielding a collegiate speech team) and colleges love that.

Competitive Speech as a Process

The process is simple:

1. Find something that you are wiling to research a bit. 📚🤓📚
2. Mash that research down into a time-limited structured talk. ⏱️🎤
3. Spend a few Saturdays repeatedly giving that talk to assorted people who have volunteered to listen to it. 📆👵🏼

Then you go to your Common App activities list and fill in that

“I earned the NSDA rank of Distinction for my presentation on how cyberattacks on US hospitals are benefiting the North Korean economy.”

(for very real less-than-150-characters example). And this shows your prospective colleges that you care enough about any of—again, for example—computer science or health care or international relations to do extra, niche, cross-discipline research within those topics and then spend a few weekends trying to explain it to politely baffled adults just because you are ✨so excited✨ to share your findings.

As a high school student, you will likely have your choice of either “Original Oratory” or “Informative Speaking” for your presentation format. Oratory tends to aim for a persuasive end while informative speaking tends to include visual aids, if you are so arts-and-crafts inclined. Both events are up to 10 minutes of memorized speaking. Your state may offer additional lower-effort events; Oregon has “Radio Commentary” which is only 5 minutes of reading from your script, or “After Dinner Speaking” which is 6 minutes of memorization and expected to be humorous.

You can, of course, also post your speech online (like on YouTube) or maybe recycle it into another venue (like a TED talk) to extend your reach with it, but getting the points for an NSDA degree is very easy to express and have recognized on your activities list.

There are other events to compete in but they provide limited opportunity for you to showcase your particular intellectual curiosity. For example, my favorite event—Programmed Oral Interpretation—can do therapeutic wonders for a student’s self-exploration and building their sense of connection to our cultural and human heritage, none of which is easily expressed on the Common App’s activities list… but it could feed into your obligatory personal statement.

What to Learn From Debate

The debate activities are respected by colleges, but do not demonstrate your interests particularly well: you have to argue on whatever topic and side you are given. This lack of autonomy can be frustrating, but the process should improve your research and critical thinking skills if you are doing it right. The additional benefits you can accrue vary by format. For example:

• Public Forum (2 vs 2) debate is very time-constrained, requiring you to get your key points so focused and clear that even your unprepared and inattentive partner will be able to correctly defend them in front of the judge. This prepares you to write your college application to have such focused and clear points that your admissions reader will be able to succinctly and successfully defend it in front of the larger admissions committee.
• Lincoln-Douglas (1 vs 1) debate will teach you to think about your deeper motivations for actions, and to appeal to other people’s deeper motivations when either explaining your actions or asking them to take action. Here is a video all about this form. Understanding this method will help you explain to a college how you are the embodiment of their institutional mission statement and they should be eager to have you as a student.
• Policy (2 vs 2) debate should teach you how to section off a part of a problem that you have an opportunity to solve, as well as recognize when people are presenting plans that will not solve the problems they are complaining about. It uses the same basic rhetorical structure that the Project Management Institute recommends and that McKinsey Consulting uses when they are charging their customers a million dollars for a deck of PowerPoint slides—future Business majors take note! This may not be directly useful when putting together a college application but it is a good cognitive structure when you are exercising your leadership skills on an organizational committee or in student government.

Research as College Preparation

The thing that I ultimately like the most about speech and debate is that most of the value is intrinsically derived from the process, not the competition. Winning feels great of course, but being legitimately proud of the work you have done and are boldly presenting for judgment is even better. And it has lasting benefits: one of my former debate students was amazed at how easy his initial college courses were “because I already learned all this stuff while researching for debate!”