What happens during DECA wait times

#waiting #bored #hijinkswegetupto

My DECA chapter of 100 people took up an entire food court at the convention centre from 7 am to 6 pm with coats, ties, shoes, bags, laptops, haphazardly stacked DECA papers and practice tests and textbooks strewn EVERYWHERE. 

I was the few unlucky ones stuck with guarding the bags duties the entire day XD 

(Namely that was imposed after I got lost trying to go to Eaton Centre to meet my friends and instead somehow trekking around the entire underground facility twice around and ultimately ending up on the 5th floor of Scotiabank where I was mistaken for an intern and glared at by this office lady. And then had to hysterically call for help from my trainer and attempt to make my way back to the food court. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I got lost big time and ended up on guard duty for 100 plus stressed teenagers who can unleash verbal nukes on you if their stuff gets lost on my watch.)

DECA Provs Pics

Pics of the event, my marketing comm family and my DECA partner and I :)

DECA PROVINCIALS

First year at DECA so my experience with Provincials is totally new and frankly WOW.

At first,  from other accounts, going to Provs was rather boring due to the fact that there is a lot of sitting around and waiting (since I was in the team category I only need to present once orally and do an exam another day), and also because of the rather unappetizing fact of having to do a 100 question multiple choice exam which consists of 50% of our final rank weight. But... despite what others say I found DECA Provs to be amazing and sooooo fun :)

I'm not going to go fully into detail since it's 12 am right now and I've only gotten 4 hours of sleep last night (studying for the written exam) and am currently running on half a cup of coffee ingested at 8 in the morning but I'll say this.
MY SCHOOL SWEPT.

It's all creds to our trainers ofc. JS and AS our trainers for my marketing communications category did an amazing job and managed to whip me, a first time DECA newbie, from a complete novice to the Top 5 Regionals Team and also to go on to earn Top 15 in the written exam rankings at the Provincial level, resulting in Amy (my partner) and I both earning nice shiny medals.

Although we didn't make it to ICDC (Oh well there's always next year) it's still been a fantastic experience and I'm so happy that the effort paid off and the lack of sleep was worth it.
Especially the lack of sleep.
Like seriously.
Since our school is rather far from the Centre, I had to drag myself up at 5:30 am to arrive at school by 6:00 am and then to endure the half hour long ride arriving at the convention by around 7:00 due to delays,  traffic and etc. And my exam is at 8. Oh joy.

The funny thing is, I never expected to win the writtens. I've always relied on orals before to win due to my public speaking skills honed from debate and half heartedly at most studied for writtens. I literally didn't study almost at all until the night before the exam ... not a recommended path as I ended up staying up until 1 am and getting 4 hours of sleep. It worked this time but no way am I planning on doing it again... writing the exam was like hell with my pounding headache and bleary eyes.
Lesson learned.

So writtens turned out pretty well ... As for orals I have no idea where we messed up. Sure maybe it went a bit over the time limit but the body language from the judge was quite favorable most of the time... so for us not to have gotten the Top 15 Overall teams while having gotten the top writtens scores must have meant a major messup in orals. Oh well, too late to remedy it now... I'll definitely take this as a lesson learned and prep more with my partner next year.

So all in all it was an amazingly fun two days... so looking forward to partaking in this again next year! :D

More to come!

Me trying to sleep during a tournament in my business clothes

I think every debater has been there.

Awesome Time At W University Debating Tournament!!!

So I went to the first debate tournament of the 2014-2015 school year at W University ... and somehow managed not to forget how to debate after a 5 month hiatus XD
My partner SW and I (HL couldn't make it for this tourney so I teamed up with a guy in my grade who's a really great debater) managed to make it to the semi-finals of the tournament and I managed to get 6th speaker award after 5 rounds with speaker points (quarters, semis and finals are not counted in terms of speaker points). It was an amazing tourney.. not solely because I did well in it but also because of the general air of camaraderie and fun (we sang on the bus for a solid one and a half hour coming home XD one of the best memories ever)!
There were so many amazing resolutions at W... most of them all centred on the theme of crime and punishment with resolutions like THW abolish the sex offender registry, THW allow legislation dealing with body rights to be determined through national referendum. Thank goodness I brought my law textbook there and studied between rounds (since I had a quiz a few days after the tourney). Coincidentally and fortunately, the very chapter I was studying for school addressed almost all the resolutions put forth so that was a huge stroke of luck for me and SW since I practically had my study notes on the subject imprinted in my head. I remember that epic moment in the quarter finals in which the opposing side gave a question challenging the validity and modernness of the constitution which I (kind of sassily) responded with a direct quote out of the Privy Council's "Living Tree Doctrine" which stated that the constitution is able to be subject to changes over time that the Fathers of Constitution did not foresee.
Anyways, all the rounds went really great and SW and I went into quarter finals with a 4-1 win to loss ratio. We won quarters but lost in the semi-finals to this team with an astounding LO speech. Oh well... I'm just happy I broke at a legitimate tournament for the first time :)

It wasn't just the debates which made the tournament... since it was overnight, there was an amazing amount of time.
When we got to the hotel, everyone just kinda dumped their stuff in their hotel room and crashed in the guys' room. There were a couple of ...interesting... happenings such as all the girls hogging the guys' bathrooms to put on makeup and guys walking around shirtless (not that I minded that much... SW had a nice chest) and chanting to Chinese wuxia war music to hype themselves up for the upcoming debate rounds (wuxia since everyone, with the exception of one person, was Chinese). And then the teachers came, saw the total party going on and ordered us back into our rooms XD
At nighttime there was this huge prankcalling session going on back and forth - it was mostly my fault as I was the one who dared EX my roommate to call the guys' rooms in a British accent pretending to be a brothel manager. Anyways, she kind of chickened out of the challenge but I did it anyways, saying this in a really posh British accent:
"Hello, this is Mike's Prostitution Brothel, bringing to you <name of town we were in> 's best prostitutes. Now tell me sir, which would you like: blonde, brunette, redhead or exotic Asian?"
I think my greatest achievement that weekend was in preventing myself from erupting in laughter while saying this.
After a long awkward pays in which I heard a muffled "Wtf" coming from the other end, blaring rap music from one of my classmates' friends (who happens to be a hilarious Mandarin wannabe rapper) albums came blasting through.
I hung up and my roommates and I just burst out cackling and rolling on the bed as we imagined the expressions on our hapless victims' faces.
It was a fun tournament.

So Western concluded my three weekend long tenure of madly intense extracurricular activities... and now, on a lovely Friday night of my free weekend, I'm just happy to relive the happy memories and relax.
Until next time! :D

XCCMUN ECTASY!!!

My school's delegation at XCCMUN (name of conference has been changed for privacy purposes).

So I just came back from the best MUN of my life (so far)... XCCMUN had been an amazing conference for me, my fellow delegates and for my whole school because not only did we walk away from Canada's number 1 most prestigious conference (not to mention the school XCC is a really fancy and high class private school which boasts the number one MUN program in all of Canada) with an Honourable Mention in the Millenium Goals Development for RK (one of my Vice Presidents of our club) and a Best Delegate for me in the IAEA (both committees being the two most advanced committees of the conference), we also managed to get the Best Small Delegation award for our school which everyone contributed to!

Sooooo happy now <3 <3 <3

DECA DECA DECA (+Intellectual Withdrawal Syndrome)

So I'm really happy to say that I've expanded my repertoire in public speaking clubs by joining the Marketing Communications DECA category at my school which has this really really great program with a bunch of people making it to ICDC last year in California. My DECA partner is Amy and she's just AMAZING - kinda shy socially yes (rather like me) but still extremely nice with a great sense of humor and a really witty intellect.

I'm still soaring on the euphoria of my very first orals presentation - a practice done in front of Alex, one of my Marketing Communications trainers. Ah.. my first DECA Orals Presentation... how do I describe the happiness that comes from being able to speak assertively and professionally, the delicious act of catharsis in the form of intellectual business strategy and the intricate game of drama that encompasses the amazing 10 minutes in which I finally let loose after months of being intellectually mute?

Nothing compares to the blissful feeling of adrenaline coursing through veins as your mind races to think up strategies and churns up every case study you've ever read in order to build up one's case in a presentation. Nothing compares to the feeling when you can speak assertively and professionally - when you get to ditch your little girl's voice you use in every day life that hides your fierceness inside and that acts as a lambskin over the wolf to make sure people (mostly other girls) don't get intimidated by your strong will and that the image of the perfect girl who is sweet, smart, pretty, and overall NICE is not shattered. Nothing.

I honestly felt like Mulan the moment when she wiped off her makeup in her ancestral shrine and sang "Reflection"... because it is when I'm debating, DECA-ing, MUN-ing, making speeches, acting as attorney in Mock Trials, practising alone in my basement with a video camera making speeches that I feel truly free.

For the entire summer, ever since Debate and MUN season ended in June up until now in early October, I had been 'intellectually mute'. I've absorbed vast quantities of material, obsessively consumed BBC News, Maclean's, TIME, world issues, textbooks, case studies and second hand law textbooks bought at Value Mart and more but had never really gotten a chance to express and let out all that knowledge. My family is fairly conservative in their views and very religious so any dissent that goes against religion isn't really allowed to be aired. Furthermore, I've never been allowed to talk back to my parents regardless of if it was a personal matter or a discussion on world affairs (unless I agree with the viewpoint they are stating) so I've always kept my views and analysis on certain issues to myself. Taiwan was even worse - I wasn't on best terms with the 12 other youths who went volunteer teaching with me (8 of the 12 were girls and I usually got along better with guys in a platonic manner due to my rather direct and assertive manner of speaking, plus everyone there was chosen due to their leadership ability in athletics, an area that I was sadly lacking in - but which I made up for in my leadership positions in MUN, Debate, etc. - and none of them really understood me and my dorm desk filled with books on economics, world issues, social and cultural identities of China and other various nerdy pursuits - my goodness, I felt that I was back in those cheesy 1980s films in which the jocks ruled the world and the nerds got trampled underfoot).
Basically to avoid me having to fish up bad memories of silent treatments and homesickness, I'll just say that I felt as censored there as pro-democratic dissidents feel in mainland China.

Long story short, I didn't utter a peep the entire summer, although debating with HL was my only sanctuary from slowly going insane.

When the school year started, it didn't get much better - I was consumed with judging the new debaters as a Debate Trainer, and now as the President of Model UN, my days with MUN consist of training new delegates (of which we have an astonishingly large number this year due to a very dedicated marketing manager). I haven't gotten a chance to properly debate in 3 months or do a proper speech other than class presentations since the orals in DECA. I can't really describe the feel of, when judging new debaters who didn't model or roadmap, who finished their speeches in 2 minutes while debating this delicious resolution that I almost literally salivated over, of wanting to run up there to the podium, push the newbies aside and launch into a passionate and intense 7 minute speech. Ugh, I feel like a druggie with withdrawal symptoms - except debate, MUN, DECA and Mock Trials happens to be my drug.

So understandably, in the first chance in forever that i get to warm up my long hibernating public speaking skills, I get high off the adrenaline rush.

During my orals presentation, the feeling that encompassed me was so blissful - the intensity of it and the quick thinking that was required freed my mind, the drama required for me to role play a marketing executive was thrilling and I thoroughly enjoyed milking the role for all it was worth, injecting humor and professionality into it.

My partner Amy also did brilliantly and she was calm, composed, utterly professional and sharp throughout.. I felt the sense of synchronicity that I thought I only felt with HL in debate. Omg at that moment I was applauding this partnering arrangement so much.

After the presentation, our trainer Alex gave us feedback and asked if it was our first presentation done together in a rather incredulous voice. After answering yes, he proceeded to tell us that was one of the better first presentations that he had ever seen. I know this probably sounds small to DECA veterans that a newbie like me is positively gushing over her first presentation but honestly... this feeling of freedom after so long, the thrill of doing something well... it's addictive.
So please bear with me as i gush XD

Anyways so Regionals is coming up on Oct 26th and I'm planning on prepping as much as possible over the long weekend.... got to run now!

Happy thanksgiving!!!