CAS 2017

I conducted an orientation session with students from our school who are going to be participating in a Model United Nations conference. As they were mostly first time delegates, I believe I helped them by imparting the knowledge I have gained by having participated in various Model United Nations Conferences.

Helping my juniors made me feel very good about myself, because the purpose of Model UN’s is to help the world, and helping the world begins at home. All the students seemed very eager to listen to all that I had to say, and this helped me feel confident in my speaking skills.

During the course of this session, I was able to identify the skills I had learnt in MUNs and I tried my best to help the junior students learn these skills too.  I also talked to them about how the typical MUN schedule works and gave them tips about research and preparation, which I believe will help them make the most out of their MUN experience.

Even students who I thought would not be interested in an activity as challenging as MUN conferences seemed to be enthusiastic to start researching  for and participating in them, which led me to change the perspective with which I saw many of my juniors.

In the future, I hope to conduct more sessions like this one, so that I am able to raise awareness about global issues, leadership skills and public speaking in my school.

I participated in the Inter House Debate Competition that was a part of the Literature and Humanities Fest. The topic of the debate was “Is competition necessary?” and our house had to speak AGAINST the topic.

I was confident of my public speaking and debating skills and the competition gave me the opportunity to hone them. However, was apprehensive of advocating for something that I myself am against, but then I decided to analyse the topic from an emotional perspective , which is new for me, because usually I rely on well, researched, logical points in debates. This shift in method gave me the opportunity to develop a new skill, which is persuasion using pathos. I was able to use the techniques of persuasion (fear, shock value) that we were taught in English class while I wrote the opening speech for the debate, and it made me glad that I was able to apply bookish knowledge to real life.

It was also a good experience to debate with a team, because usually when I go to MUNs, I am on my own. Debating collaboratively made me realize how different people are able to connect different real life situations and examples to a given topic which lead to to the understanding that different people have different ways of saying the same thing, and that all the ways are unique and correct.

I was also glad that the competition gave me a platform to speak up about something I feel strongly about; the stress and harm that competitive exams inflict on students. It good know that teachers were able to empathize with the stress that students undergo. I hope that my speech changes the way we are burdened with homework and test!

Overall, though the arguments that I made had a lot of room for improvement, I am happy with my participation and performance in the competition.