A Speech Bowl Event

February 27, 2015

By Starr Lee

On February 27, 2016 the University of Wisconsin Whitewater Speech Team hosted its annual Forensics Speech Bowl competition on campus. With over 587 high school students in attendance from 40 different schools in the surrounding area.

*The Speech Bowl has been around for several years and the UW- Whitewater Speech Team Director, Jim Disrude has kept on this tradition because “it is important to give back to the high school community and is a great time for recruiting students interested in collegiate forensics.”

The competition began at 7:40 a.m., with registration in the University Center. There was a total of 600 entries.

Coaches led their teams to find quiet places to do warm-ups, practice pieces, and eat breakfast. However, one can imagine the difficulty of finding a silent area in a building full of people who participate in speech as an activity.

The Whitewater speech team ran around helping students find rooms, answering questions, and listening to any concerns one might have. Whitewater Sophmore and speech team member Heather Patterson, describes the experience as “ an incredible energy because everyone is so excited to be there and I think the college setting makes it so much more fun and unique than your typical high school forensics tournament.”

Student’s compete against each other in categories such as Farrago, Prose, Radio, 4-Minute Speaking, Moments in History, and Poetry. Each student is assigned a room along with up to seven other competitors all performing at their best to gain a first place rank.

After three rounds, results of finals was revealed as students gathered around in bunches screaming, hugging, and crying from tears of joy.

At the award ceremony Senior, Hannah Farajpanahi performed her award winning poetry piece in the young auditorium packed with high-schoolers. “You spend so much time cultivating the perfect performance so you can really communicate with your audience, but you usually do not see the effect your message has on people, this was overwhelming” says Farajphanai after recieving a standing ovation.   

Forensics is an activity that can help students succeed socially, academically, and professionally. These forensciators love what they do and it shines through in their performances.

A Steve Jobs’ Commencement Speech

June 12, 2005

By Starr Lee

Today, Steve Jobs’ graced the graduating class of 2005 s at Stanford University with a commencement speech the students will never forget. Job’s shares life stories of struggles he has overcame that has molded him into the business mogul who stands on the stage before us.

In delivering the speech, Job’s exclaims the process of connecting the dots, love and loss, and death.

When speaking on connecting the dots Jobs discusses how his birth mother did not want him. Yet, she would not give him up to the adoptive parents without their promise that he would someday attend college.

Yet, Jobs never completed his degree at Reed College in Portland, Oregon that his adoptive parents spent their life savings to afford. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and college was not going to help me figure that out” says Jobs.

However, this did not stop him from getting his education. Jobs became a drop-in student and attended courses that sparked his interest such as calligraphy. He stated, “ If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

Also, having no place to rest he took to settling into friend’s dorm rooms.

Job’s describes his journey in a way that makes one feel that there is nothing in life that is definite. One has to take risk and be willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve success by having faith and believing that everything can work out great.

Jobs and Steve “Woz” Kovinak worked together tiresly in Jobs parents garage eventually developing a business they called Apple Inc that “in ten years would grow into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.”

Love came with the strong feelings he felt for computers and relationship he developed with Laurene Powell. While, loss came when he was fired from the company in regards to a man he helped to hire. After getting fired, Jobs turned a negative into a positive by starting new companies, NeXT and Pixar.

Five years later, Pixar became popular from creating “the world’s first animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.”

Eventually, Jobs found himself back in his lead position at his former company when Apple purchased NeXT.

Over a year ago, Jobs faced a health scare when he was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. Doctors felt his illness would only take a terrible turn quickly and he needed to prepare for the worst.

Though Jobs like any other challenge faced was not giving up, and thankfully was able to have surgery to remove the tumor. For him giving up meant he had “ to try to tell your kids everything you thought you would have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.”

His journey came with quite a few bumps in the road but nevertheless did not stop him from becoming CEO of Apple and Pixar Animation Studios. Jobs lives his dreams and dares us all to go out and do the same.