Jul 25, 2023 At 12:48 PM EDT
On the final day of the New York City Urban Debate League (NYCUDL) summer debate institute, medals and trophies lined a table in a Hunter College classroom.
Cheers erupted as league staff announced the top teams and speakers of the end-of-camp debate tournament among 65 middle and high school students.
Students, with their bellies full of ice cream, clapped for their friends who they only met a few days earlier and go to different schools in different boroughs.
While it was a lively ceremony, the NYCUDL Summer Institute is not about winning awards. It's about what they learned to earn them.
"One big thing about our league is that we're outcome-focused, but we're life outcome-focused, not so much competitive outcome-focused," NYCUDL Executive Director Amisha Mody Mehta told Newsweek.
Friday was a big day for our Summer Debaters! Two weeks of hard work came together at our end of camp tournament, and the day was filled with treats for the students. After a special breakfast and...
The NYCUDL Summer Institute runs online and in person for novice to varsity debaters across the city. During the two weeks, students participate in instructional labs on public forum and parliamentary debate.
After a few years completely online, the camp returned in person in 2022. But this is the first year without masking and vaccine requirements.
The COVID pandemic didn't just impact NYCUDL's Summer Institute, it ushered in a new era for the league's leadership and programing.
Mody Mehta said that for a while, the league was stuck in the "startup phase" and she is "excited that we finally have made it." After a successful fundraiser earlier this summer, she feels the league has bounced back from the "chaotic" time during the pandemic.
Despite restructuring, the goals of the league have remained the same. While it's great to go to tournaments and win, Mody Mehta said that only happens to a handful of students. Her focus, therefore, is about teaching students how to be lifelong learners and critical thinkers who can advocate for themselves, confidently give presentations and decipher misinformation online.
Mi Ha Nguyen is a rising sophomore at University Neighborhood High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She's only been debating for a few months but said participating in the activity helped her become "more extroverted."
"I felt kind of stressed out because of all the stuff I had to get done," she said. "I was struggling finding evidence and coming up with questions on the spot. But as time went on, just going to tournaments, I got better and better at it as I faced hard opponents and learned from them."
She's already learned so much in just a few days at camp, like how to prepare and organize arguments in rounds.
Nguyen's experience is something Sophia Lam knows well.
Lam just finished her first year at Harvard Law School and is currently a summer associate at Selendy Gay Elsberg, a law firm based in New York. But years ago, she was just like Nguyen.
Lam is an alumna of the NYCUDL who attended Poly Prep Country Day School, a private school in Brooklyn, on scholarship. Even though she was a self-described "shy and reserved" kid with dreams of becoming an engineer, she decided to try out debate.
She competed for three years and even coached a high school team for a few years while attending the University of Chicago.
Now she is back in New York helping young debaters. Selendy Gay Elsberg hosted campers at their offices and sent associates to volunteer as judges for the tournament on the last day of camp as part of a sort of "day of service," Lam said.
"A lot of law firms really like to get involved with [Urban Debate leagues]," she said. "Lawyers are debaters at heart, right? So it's really nice to see how you can give [these kids] the confidence to be a lawyer. I think without debate, I probably wouldn't have been a lawyer."
Lam said she went through a sort of "evolution" through debate: becoming more confident, a more eloquent speaker and a more critical thinker. These skills—along with research and persuasive writing—are a large part of what Lam does at the firm.
"Those definitely paid off now—I can type like nobody's business," she said.
For Lam, judging the NYCUDL Summer Institute tournament was a reunion with the league and an opportunity for reflection to see how far she's come.
"I see myself in a lot of these kids, [especially] the ones that are too scared to fill their speech time and are frazzled about standing up in front of all these people trying to make an argument," she said. "It's nice to be back [because] I started there, and I've grown so much since then. I think debate is a huge part of that, and it's exciting to see the next generation get to do it, too."
This is hopefully not the last time Lam will get involved with the Urban Debate system to help ensure more students are included in debate—an activity she notes has "a huge barrier of entry."
Not only does debate require a lot of time and energy, but it is typically an activity for wealthy students at private schools. Lam said Urban Debate leagues are a huge part of bridging that gap of accessibility for minority students in low-income areas.
Mody Mehta said she views debate as a youth development opportunity.
"It's not different than, like, Little League, where everybody should have equal playing time, everyone should have an opportunity to learn," she said. "You can't be great at something if you haven't been taught how to do it [but] if you can't access it, then that's a whole different story."
The league is working to make debate more accessible for the hundreds of students in the league. This includes expanding opportunities for students to work toward college debate scholarships and bringing in non-debater staff who work in education to create curriculum helping teachers build debate programs in schools.
The NYCUDL's goal, Mody Mehta said, is to not only get students to start debating but to stay debating.
"You have to make it fun because not everybody has a win on day one," she said. "And when you already don't think you belong in the space [and] you don't have any wins, you're kind of like, 'Well, I don't belong here, I'm not coming back.'"
Additionally, when the NYCUDL debaters visited the Selendy Gay Elsberg office this summer, Mody Mehta said she made it a point to ask the firm to introduce students to attorneys of color "so that they could see themselves reflected in the firm."
"When people make you feel like you belong, then you have the confidence to go tackle the parts that are more difficult or you thought weren't for you," she said.
At the end of the summer session, Mody Mehta is looking forward to expanding programming and educational opportunities to keep students engaged and growing.
"We're giving them those skills to get them to a better position than where they are," she said. "Sure, we've kept them out of trouble, but what skills are we giving them? If they spend that much time with us, I think it's incumbent upon us to do that."
