Application FAQs

It is 100% free. Flights, travel, accomodations, insurance, visa are all paid for.

Brian, Tejas, and Sam will view your applications in whole. We may ask individuals in the WSDC and WUDC circuits for help for better contextualisation of certain pieces of applications. We will not share demographic information attached to any particular application. Under extraordinary circumstances (e.g. >2000 applications or for safety reasons) we may ask for external review of a complete application. Applicants may ask for varying forms of privacy beyond the above stipulations if they so wish and we will try our best to meet this.

Your actual CV will be primarily evaluated on the basis of your academic interests, as showcased by the sorts of courses you are taking, academic performance, results in closely associated extracurriculars (such as Olympiads or contests in various subjects), and any work experience programs or internships. However, if one of those fields is lacking, it will not be an immediately disqualifying factor; rather, we will look at the CV holistically, especially with the understanding that students may not have the opportunity to build up a substantial CV in all of these areas.

Your debating CV will be evaluated on the basis of your competitive results. Please indicate the name and year of the competition, the size of the competition, and if available, the tab link available. Please select your top 20 competition results. If you do not have 20 competition results, that is not a disqualifying factor; we will evaluate debating CVs holistically and understand some circuits have fewer tournaments and concentrate the resources on those.

Language status describes the exposure to English an applicant has had; it is common in the global debating circuit outside of the United States. We will be following the definitions of the WUDC circuit.

We understand that the debating world is deeply unequal and many students do not have formal coaching. This question is both to understand the context in which an individual debates in and also to make sure we don’t create conflict of interests in the evaluations if we ask for external consultation.

Unfortunately, we cannot blind applications due to the nature of debating achievements like speaker tabs.

Yes. We will have the other person judge the application.

We are able to support all costs of an expedited visa. If you need a faster application turnaround time just email us. We will try our hardest to accommodate.

We are format agnostic in terms of applications but our format teaching will center WSDC and BP given the distribution of coaches. Moreover, we are cognisant of some circuits having barriers to WSDC. We think this is good preparation for university debating too. The impact of this camp we believe will come from the community as well as our teaching.

We like intellectual diversity. The point of the fellowship is not to preach some set of ideals but rather to introduce people to ideas they haven’t thought about before in debating. The set of coaches at the camp have various ideological commitments. Brian, Sam, and Tejas have a lot of disagreements amongst themselves!

We will assist you in getting one financially if administratively feasible. However, there might be some circumstances in which this is not possible due to time constraints.