Are you MAD?

Are you MAD?



Learning from the Most Awesome Debating society in the world,

Consisted of Marvelously Attractive Debaters!

Interviewed and edited by Hyo Jeong Kim

Monash Assocation of Debaters, MAD is currently ranked as one of the most successful debating societies in the world, following recent two World championships in 2011 and 2012. MAD has long history, entering its 50^th year in 2012. MAD has 700 members, with around 100-150 active members who regularly attend training and social events. Are you curious about MAD? This is all about MAD, hearing from Gemma Buckley and Chris Bisset.

Gemma is the President of MAD, studying Arts at Monash. She has been a part of MAD since her first week of university, which proves her destiny to be the president. Chris is a Training Manager of MAD, majoring in Law and Arts. He is smart enough to triple major but also an easy-going guy who loves to relax on the couch watching TV dramas with sweet potato chip

Hearing from Gemma about general administration of MAD

Recruiting process and motivation

MAD recruits people from all backgrounds, including people who have absolutely no debating experience. MAD prides itself of having a unique training program, which is able to create great debaters of people within a short period of time, no matter how good or bad they started out. MAD is competitive. It is difficult to get into teams for tournaments like Australs and Worlds and that knowledge definitely motivates members to work hard on improving their debating.

Alumni Tradition

MAD has a strong tradition of alumni coming back and providing training and assistance to younger debaters. Despite the fact that many of alumni work important and stressful full-time jobs, they are usually very willing to provide whatever help they can. Former members generally feel like they owe something back to the club, given how much help they were given by alumni, so they want to pass on the knowledge that they have in the same way.

Election process to be board members

MAD elects our executive once a year. All club members get to come and run or simply vote for candidates at the Annual General Meeting. It is very competitive to actually be elected. In general, there is a huge emphasis on work ethic and previous commitment to the club.

Hearing from Chris about training system of MAD

General information about training session

The training of members falls to the Member Training Officer who has a seat on the executive committee. Every Monday at 5pm, MAD provides seminars which normally have a choice of three that vary according to subject matter and degree of difficulty. Seminars or lectures are given by senior members of the club or by past members of the club. Kiran Iyer, for example, often gives a seminar about Russian politics because he has done a lot of work in that area. We also have more general seminars about tactics or manner.
We normally use PowerPoint slides and we have a pretty good collection from previous years, but we always leave it up to the individual presenter to fine-tune them. We try and make the seminars as interactive as possible and to have as many examples and real world scenarios as possible. Seminars normally go between 45 and 60 minutes.

After seminar, we have dinner provided by free pizza and then we have a practice debate which ends at 10 p.m. These happen each week throughout the University Semester and are alternated with Internal Debating tournament some weeks.

Debating Topic

Motions are normally selected by the Internals Officer and they aim to be both accessible and yet challenging. At the beginning of the year when we have lots of new members we try and make sure the topics are interesting and exciting to keep them attracted to university debating. We run one debate each week where some of our more experienced second years do more complicated and quirky topics. These are meant to help explore interesting arguments that we might not normally make. For example we debated the topic, ‘That Iran should pre-emptively strike Israel’s long range fighter capabilities’ or ‘That we should abolish all prisons’.

Preparation for International Debating Competition

Sometimes it feels like we’re debating morning and night. Our normal expectation is that teams A-C will do at least 20 debates each, plus pre-tournament warm-up competitions. We also do matter preparation whereby we divide up different areas to research and then prepare very brief reports and share them among the teams.

MAD team selection process

Selections are the responsibility of the Externals Officer and they are normally done by people totally outside of the MAD institution. This might be older, former MAD members, but we normally try and get highly accomplished people from other universities because they are less likely to be swayed by friendships and other things. Sometimes we help by compensating these people for their flights and accommodation.

We have an initial stage whereby everyone gets to debate in front of each selector. People’s positions in those debates are allocated randomly. The selectors then decide which debaters they want to see again and these people move into the ‘call-back’ stage. There are then two or three debates (with positions and team composition decided by the selectors) in front of the whole panel. The selectors then rank the speakers.

From here speakers can swap with one another, but only with the consent of everyone affected by the swap. The teams are then formed with the first three (or two for BP) ranked speakers forming Monash A, etc.

Special Training Session

There was a debate with Christian Scientist, John Mckay under the motion . ‘The evidence does not support evolution and could support creation. Like this, MAD is often contacted by external groups that want to do public debates with our members. We use these events as an opportunity to attract new members and help build an exciting campus life. We have had other debates about Organ Donation, Refugee policy and homelessness. One of our unforgettable session was, we had one session with a former member who is now a motivational speaker and public speaking consultant for corporate boards. He came in and did a session on manner, in which he asked us to recite the Gettysburg Address and do it in as many different voices and speeds and tones as possible. It was very funny.

Last thing to say for Korean Debaters?

Gemma : Debating is such a worthwhile exercise. It really makes you a more thoughtful, confident and well-rounded person. Given that, it is absolutely worth putting time and effort into becoming the best debater you can be.

Chris : Do lots of debates. Do something different in each debate. Don’t just debate for the sake of it – think about what you’re trying to do and how you can do it better. Debating requires practice, but it also requires deliberate, disciplined self-criticism or else you’ll just keep doing the same mistakes over and over again. Watch some of the videos of debating on the internet to get more experience of the best debaters in the world!