Two ITB Students Won First Place in Dobridge Worlds 2022 International Debate Competition
BANDUNG, itb.ac.id —Two ITB students, Leonardus Hans Sebastian Tahyudin from the 2020 Metallurgical Engineering undergraduate program and Muhammad Ibnu Fadlin Syah from the 2019 Urban and Regional Planning undergraduate program, won first place for the English as Foreign Language (EFL) category in the international debate competition Dobridge Worlds 2022. This competition was organized by Doxbridge Debating on Monday (3/1/2022) online.
Doxbridge Worlds 2022 is a debate event organized by a joint debate community from Durham, Oxford and Cambridge (Doxbridge Debating). This event was created to prepare debate teams around the world to face the most prestigious debate event, the World Universities Debating Championships (WUDC).
One of the categories from the Doxbridge Worlds 2022 competition was English as Foreign Language (EFL). This category was targeted for participants from countries which do not use the English language as their official language, such as Brunei, Belgrade, Indonesia, and other countries. “All teams are prioritized to compete in the Open Break and if they fail to pass, they are classified to the EFL or ESL break. Coincidentally, yesterday’s open break was in 32 teams, ESL 8, and EFL 4," said Hans.
In this international debate event, Leonardus Hans dan Muhammad Ibnu Fadlin were required to understand many general topics, especially the latest social issues. This is due to how the themes raised in each round vary, for example, from politics to international relations such as the Middle East and Russia issue. Not only that, in order to master the debate stage, they must also understand the basic principles and legal systems such as Civil Law and Common Law.
According to Hans, the most challenging aspect they had to go through in this competition was when they had to face unique ideas from Western opponents. This was not only due to how said opponents often use unique argument structures, but they also often use excellent dialectics.
On facing these challenges, Hans used two approaches. The first was by emphasizing the mindset that there are no arguments that cannot be refuted, and the second was by listening and watching videos of English debates to get used to it.
Before competing, Hans often reads articles from international websites to gain a larger understanding of issues happening all over the world. “Besides that, I also like to read opinionated news from Aeon often,” Leonardus Hans said.
When asked about strategies, Hans admitted he did not have a fixed one. He prefers to enjoy each and every process in this competition. This is because he and his partner had just been a team at that time and had never interacted with an opposing team at all before. “Even though we lost in this round and got 4th place, we’ll take it easy, keep our optimism and try again in the next round,” he explained.
Reporter: Inas Annisa Aulia (Visual Art, 2020)
Translator: Hanna Daniela Ayu (Faculty of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, 2021)
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