Fauziatun Nabila Sudarko, a student of the Faculty of Psychology, Universitas Indonesia (FPsi UI) won the 2nd Runner-up Prize for The Speech Contest at the ASEAN Intervarsity Youth Competition 2022. The competition has been organized by Prince of Songkla University, Thailand, together with Universiti Utara Malaysia and Universitas Airlangga, since 2019. The goal is to improve leadership and public speaking skills, as well as build connections between undergraduate students in ASEAN universities. The ASEAN Intervarsity Youth Competition 2022 consists of three competitions, which are Speech Contest, Science Inspiration Talk, and ASEAN Quiz. The top ten participants will qualify for the final round held offline at Prince of Songkla University.
“To gain insights relevant to the theme of the competition, I listened to podcasts related to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and read articles on ASEAN cooperation. In addition, to prepare for performing and giving speeches, I practiced by joining other speech competitions in Indonesia,” said Nabila.
The Speech Contest consists of two rounds, the preliminaries and the finals. In the preliminary round, participants were asked to upload a video speech in English with the theme “Youth Engagement Towards SDGs in the ASEAN Community” with a maximum duration of three minutes. In the final round, participants were asked to make an impromptu speech with a new theme and were given one hour to prepare.
“Administratively, I was greatly assisted by Pejuang Biru Muda, under Student Executive Board (BEM) Faculty of Psychology UI,” he said. In addition, he said, there was support from the UI Faculty of Psychology. “Mentally, I was worried about the judges’ preferences, as the Speech Contest is quite subjective. However, I finally decided to perform according to the style of speech that I like and am good at,” Nabila said when describing the challenges she faced.
In the past two years, Nabila has participated in as many as 20 speech competitions, at both national and international levels. She hopes that in the future more UI students will try to develop their public speaking and story telling skills through speech competitions.
Dean of the Faculty of Psychology UI Dr. Bagus Takwin, M. Hum., Psychologist., is very grateful and proud of the achievements of the Psychology Faculty students on 16-20 September 2022 at the international competition. “Hopefully Nabila’s achievements can be followed by other friends, so that they can continue to make the name of the Faculty of Psychology UI more widely known,” he said.
