Few days ago, whilst I was walking past the Halo theatre in the afternoon, my footsteps were abruptly interrupted by a sudden great cheer coming out from inside. Out of curiosity I took a peek inside and saw what was happening—the Shenzhen Regional Round of the World Scholar’s Cup was held in SCIE this month. This did bring back some good memories from the Online Round that I have already attended this April.
To be honest, the plan to attend the WSC in this summer was totally unexpected and impromptu. Before then, I had rarely heard of this activity, let alone wanting to participate in it. About 2 weeks before the main event, a message from one of my friends notified me about the competition. He was not one of my classmates. Interestingly, we met in the ping-pong court while pursuing our same interest—ping pong. He sent me a few resources and asked if we could group together, form a team to give this a try—after about an hour of background research about the event, I saw no point in saying no.
The WSC differs from other academic competitions that I’ve known before. As an event integrating knowledge, communication, collaboration, and individual ability, it was a intriguing challenge. There are four main events covering these four broad fields: Scholar’s Bowl(Teamwork), Team Debate, Collaborative Writing, and Scholar’s Challenge(Individual). I remember when I looked at material given for preparations for the scholar’s challenge provided to us by the WSC. The first topic I came across was very unexpected: Mistakes.
It was questions and research material about mistakes made on history and actions done to resolve it. For example, one question was: when is an apology not an apology? I spent two days finishing the section, getting to the next big section, history. Perhaps by coincidence, nobody in the trio was familiar on history. When we got to the section of “art and music”, I remember joking to my team : “By the time we’re familiar with everything in the book, the prizes for this round of the WSC would already be announced.”
Even though we were quite anxious about falling behind on arming ourselves with knowledge beforehand, the event was actually not that scary. I’ll recite some interesting memories that I still remember with a smile even today. In our first round of debate, we went against a very strong opponent from Shanghai. They had already attended the WSC once, and their plethora of experience took us quite by surprise, and proved to us the importance of reviewing before the event.
We didn’t lose badly, but nevertheless all of us were miserable when we entered the Zoom meeting for our second round of debate—and found that our opponent had the same face on. The astonishing thing that happened is that we then struck up a conversation with them so smoothly it was quite unbelievable. They were very vibrant, and we had just plunged into an analysis of why we both lost in our previous rounds when the judge of the round entered and said: “You guys look like you’ve just swallowed a lemon whole!”
In addition, I still remember our messages from the communication group we set up for communication during the event. In retrospect, it may have been a little embarrassing to talk about, but looking back on the chat history we have sent at least more than 30 messages of “We can do this!”, or “Come on!” to each other over the course of the day. However, as we worked through the activities our confidence grew with our curiosity, along with the realization that there are so much things to learn outside of curriculum that we are interested in and would like to pursue as a hobby.
About halfway through the day we didn’t need to motivate ourselves anymore, we just bashed through things like a cannon ball smashing past paper. However, nothing is etched as deep into my mind compared to a moment during the Scholar’s bowl. We encountered a question, and I said something from Biology, one of my teammates added something from Economics, and the last one threw in his knowledge from Art and we had an answer. It really made my realize the interconnection between different subjects and how fields that we were familiar with could help each one of us realize our value in the team and later in society.
Talking about the awards that I have received later in the year, I want to say that all of my personal awards were achieved thanks to the cheers and encouragement from my two teammates, and that I’m very honored to receive them given that I didn’t exactly prepare much for it. Nevertheless, I’ll be honored to be qualified to go to the 2023 WSC Global Round held in Xiamen City.
This time, I’ll come ready.
- Article | Tico Yang
