Passionate about debates since her high school years, Ana Coman, currently a student at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Bucharest, has participated with great results in numerous competitive university debates at the European and international level.
Representative of Romania in the European and world council of competitive university debates, Ana Coman spoke to us about the format of these debates and what they propose, but also about the ways in which this type of activity can be promoted more intensively in the Romanian university milieu.
Compared by Ana to a game of chess, academic debates develop both critical thinking, analytical capacities and the development of viable strategies, as well as oratorical, rhetorical, public speaking skills, and, last but not least, those “of sending to people a certain emotion or sense of need” regarding topical issues.
The topics approached in the debates are extremely varied and cover, as Ana says, almost everything that could be relevant to society and could be discussed in a decision-making forum: from international relations to politics, economy, philosophy to social issues, public policies, human relations, education. As such, in addition to skills aimed at discursive capabilities, the participant must also make a significant documentation effort in order to successfully build their arguments.
Ana Coman spoke to us about all this and much more in a short interview that we invite you to access here.
Ana Coman is part of a team that participates in competitions under the auspices of the University of Bucharest, and which also includes Valeriu Cărășel, student at the Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies. The delegation of the University of Bucharest is completed by a team made up of Theodora Simion and Dragoș Sassu, both master’s students in the Behavioral Economics English language program of the Faculty of Business and Administration of UB.The video was filmed in the Martin Luther King Jr. Amphitheater of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Bucharest.