By Rick Vacek | May 9, 2024
There was the travel. First time to Europe for all four Comet Speech and Forensics team members from The University of Texas at Dallas. Airport layovers, long flights, plenty of time to hang out.
“We’re all doing different things – different schools, different majors. We don’t really see each other often in school,” said Arlin Khan. “Tournaments are when we get to spend time with each other.”
There was the food. The amazing fish and chips in Ireland. The deliciously rich pasta in Italy. “My college diet consists of marinara sauce and everything else,” said junior Sneha Elangovan, one of the team’s co-captains.
There was the opportunity to try British parliamentary debate, in which four teams of two speakers apiece take sides – either the government or the opposition. “It’s the format over there,” said senior Alex de Jesus-Colon.
There even was getting together to binge-watch Love Is Blind. “A good bonding experience,” the other co-captain, senior Margaret Belford, said with a smile. Ah, the irony of uniting while viewing a reality television show in which couples get engaged before meeting in person.
Best of all, Comet Speech and Forensics’ first trip to the International Forensics Association (IFA) tournament in Dublin was a competitive success among the 40 top-tier teams, many of them from the U.S.
Elangovan, the only junior in the group, reached the semifinals in informative speaking and extemporaneous speaking and finished third among more than 50 competitors in persuasive speaking.
Khan was a semifinalist in impromptu speaking.
Belford placed sixth in audio narration and Irish literature interpretation.
Not only did they impress the judges, but they also earned high marks from their coach, Dr. John Gooch, area head for communication studies and associate professor of rhetoric and communication studies for the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology.
“Not only are they smart, good competitors. They compete the right way – the way I want them to compete,” said Gooch, who took over in 2022 after Brad Skiles, a UT Dallas information technology employee, started the team four years earlier. “They’re serious, they’re focused, they’re competitive without being egomaniacal. I couldn’t be more grateful for that. They’re a wonderful bunch of people.”
That sentiment was shared at two Italian universities where Gooch has served as a visiting professor, Verona and Brescia. The UT Dallas students performed demonstration speeches and debates for faculty and students from those institutions.
“The most memorable thing for me is the way they wowed my colleagues,” Gooch said. “They couldn’t get over how smart they are and how they don’t complain.”
The wows continued a few weeks later when the team sent its largest contingent of qualifiers (junior Pranav Kumar and the Ireland/Italy foursome) to the American Forensic Association National Speech Tournament at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In addition, the team had two qualifiers (Belford and de Jesus-Colon) in three categories for the first time.
On the same early April weekend, senior Savannah Sauseda presented an impressive demonstration of an after-dinner speech at the Southern States Communication Association, focusing on her experiences working in Washington, D.C., as a member of the Archer Fellowship Program in the Hobson Wildenthal Honors College.
That wrapped up the team’s most successful season. But there is seemingly no end to the memories the students created, especially overseas.
“I will definitely look back at it as one of the most eye-opening experiences of my college career – not just my time with Speech and Forensics,” said Belford, an international political economy senior who wants to become a foreign service officer. “That trip capped all the skills we’ve learned as a team over four years. It was just phenomenal.”
Supporting each other is a key element of speech and forensics. Teammates critique each other during their weekly practice sessions, then sit in the audience to cheer on each other at events.
“When any of us expresses a thought, it’s very well-received,” Khan said. “Half of speech is not being a speaker but being a good audience member. That is a quality in all of us, and it makes it really easy for us to get along with each other. It’s a good place to have good discourse – valuable discourse – and not be disrespected.”
Said Belford, “We’re united by a common purpose – to perform well as a team. Even when we’re directly head-to-head in the same room and it’s going to be decided between one of us, we’re never against one another. When one of us wins, all of us win.”
They also share a passion for the topics of their talks.
For Elangovan and Khan, it’s health care and other medical issues. They both want to become doctors.
For de Jesus-Colon, it’s the issues facing his native Puerto Rico.
Belford’s passion, quite understandably, is foreign policy.
Kumar, like Belford a National Merit Scholar and Honors College student, avidly talks about opioid overdose response, which fits with his on-campus job. He’s an emergency medical technician (EMT) for the University Emergency Medical Response (UEMR) unit at UT Dallas.
“People don’t just join a speech team from a vacuum,” Kumar said. “They always have some niche interest, and then speech is a fantastic platform for them to advocate for their topic.
“We all have an incentive to prop each other up because we’re all here for a good cause. We actually care for what we’re talking about.”
But “it’s also its own art form,” de Jesus-Colon said. “We don’t just simply talk for the sake of talking or talk for the sake of winning. We talk in a way to learn how to better talk about things that are personal to us because we care about those issues.”
Better yet, learning how to deliver their ideas clearly and concisely will benefit them in their careers. Elangovan has seen how it could make her a better doctor someday.
“Speech is a timed event. You have to pick and choose what to say and when to say it to have the effect you want it to have,” she said. “I think I can carry that with me as a physician because you don’t often have a lot of time with patients and you have to carefully pick out what you want to say to them.”
It even can help in other ways … right now. Khan, set to start medical school in the fall at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, said she is able to write essays more quickly and asks more probing questions thanks to her speech experience. It even came in handy during her medical school interviews.
“It doesn’t just become a lifestyle,” she said. “It helps you in every aspect of your life.”
And don’t think for a second that these well-spoken students always have talked like this. They tell similar stories of their shyness before joining a speech team.
Elangovan said she was so shy and reserved in high school, she wouldn’t talk to people unless they talked to her.
Khan decided to try it simply because she was terrified of public speaking.
Belford said she broke down crying the first time she tried to give a speech.
Before Belford recruited him for Comet Speech and Forensics, de Jesus-Colon was an information technology major. Now he’s in the process of switching to political science.
“Speech has helped me with interpersonal connections but much more with speaking publicly and learning how to do it right,” he said. “You can have all the passion you want, but if you don’t know how to read the audience and how to tool your message, then you’re just saying words to the wind.”
The IFA competition was inspiring right up to the end, in the awards ceremony. Belford, who had been taking note of speakers’ transitions and wordplay throughout the tournament, will never forget the sights and sounds of hundreds of students filling the Trinity College Dublin auditorium.
“Just seeing everyone cheering for everyone else, the support in that room, the community, it was incredible to see that many people so dedicated,” she said. “This is the highest level of speech and debate, of competitive speech, and they were giving their all and supporting everyone through it and supporting that intellectual journey on everyone’s behalf. It was beautiful.
“This is the best of the best. It’s very tough at nationals, but this was everyone who goes to nationals and then some bringing their absolute ‘A’ game. I’d sit down after a round and watch other people give their pieces and just be stunned. You can’t find that high a level of competition anywhere else. It’s a completely unique experience.”
In so many ways.
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Read more: How students navigate speech and forensics categories
Coming soon: UT Dallas Debate sent two competitors to the IFA tournament and also earned its 22nd consecutive invitation to the National Debate Tournament.