Published March 10, 2009
Written by Grace Chen
While joining any community college club can help boost your chances of employment after graduation, students participating in debate clubs tend to possess even greater hiring odds!
A community college’s debate club teaches members how to research, articulate arguments, and clarify ideas. Subsequently, individuals actively engaging in debate club activities are often more prepared to speak clearly during interviews, demonstrate a professional presence, and clearly explain ideas and abilities. Indeed, there are many reasons why debating in college can lead to you debating all the job offers on the table post graduation!
Networking with the Professional Community
While each community college’s debate club may focus on its own unique topics, most debate clubs strive to boost students’ investigations of community and social issues.
For example, Gulf Coast Community College (GCCC), located in Panama City, Florida, is one of the many community colleges providing students with socially relevant debate club opportunities. As GCCC explains, the campus’ debate club strives to create academic and educational opportunities for students who are particularly interested in issues pertaining to politics, social change, and community topics. By engaging in these issues, members of the debate club are required to research and find out details about the various topics at hand.
As a result of this research process, debaters find themselves communicating through public forms. Engaging in the debate club can provide debaters with greater access to social and community networks. If focusing on an issue pertaining to public school teaching, for example, debaters may need to leverage information obtained through personal interviews with school leaders. By establishing these contacts and connections, debaters are able to establish their broad professional network before graduation. Depending upon one’s career pathway, these unique networks can later prove very powerful.
Personal and Professional Development
In addition to allowing students to broaden their professional network and connections, the debate club experiences also helps students improve their personal and professional attributes and skills. Specifically, as Gulf Coast Community College explains, the debate club allows students to take advantage of activities that are helpful to the development of one’s personal and professional growth.
Additionally, as Spokane Falls Community College in Washington reveals, debaters are provided with challenging opportunities to enhance their communication and speaking skills. As Spokane describes, debate club consistently promotes standards of “excellence in public speaking, presentation, and argumentation and debate via intercollegiate competition.”
By providing students with the venue to speak and clarify thoughts, research, and ideas, active participants of debate club gain greater experiences and critiques to improve their personal and professional communication skills. As many employers require applicants to attend and engage in multiple interviews, one’s speaking skills and communication abilities are absolutely imperative to helping students gain better odds of earning a potential job.
Resume Depth and Experience
Today’s job market continues to become increasingly competitive. Subsequently, it is significantly important for applicants to include all relevant work and extracurricular experiences on their resumes. Most notably, if an applicant is seeking employment, but has minimal to no prior work experiences, extracurricular activities can become the main focal point to boost an applicant’s chances of employment.
As Mass Bay Community College, located in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, explains, a resume should have a list of all professional and volunteer experiences that can highlight a candidate’s strengths. Additionally, when listing experiences, Mass Bay suggests that students also include a brief and positive summary of the work experiences and responsibilities pertaining to each experience and activity. In the case of debate club, applicants can explain how their responsibilities of debating included group communication, public speaking, accurate research, meeting deadlines, and so forth.
Ultimately, with the debate club experiences, applicants are able to show employers how they have successfully communicated, worked under pressure, and engaged in critical thinking to achieve the goals of all tasks. All of these unique attributes are highly appealing, as employers reviewing applicants seek out individuals who can, without a doubt, work hard with intelligence, experience, and fortitude.
Resources:
Gulf Coast Community College, available at http://www.gulfcoast.edu/student_orgs/debate/constitution.htm
Mass Bay Community College, available at http://www.massbay.edu/studentlife.aspx?id=1226
Spokane Falls Community College, available at http://www.spokanefalls.edu/Resources/StudentLife/Clubs/IntercollegiateSpeechDebate.aspx
Wayland Student Press, “Debate Club,” available at http://waylandstudentpress.com/2008/05/12/debate-club/
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