When he applied to colleges, Vaibhav Bajpai '07 of Calcutta, India, looked at three things: "Did they offer aid to international students? Bates has a phenomenal package. Did they have a strong economics department? Bates’ is fantastic. And did they have a debate team? The Brooks Quimby Debate Council has a very distinguished history at Bates, dating to 1855. My decision was simple."

Debate is addictive, says Bajpai, the council's publicity coordinator. "When you start, you do not like it, but then you develop a taste for it and slowly it consumes your life. It is so much fun."

The debate team does quite a bit of traveling, he says. Bajpai and his teammates have regularly competed in England, at Oxford and Cambridge tournaments, and at the World University Debate Championships in both Malaysia and Dublin. With the help of their coach, Bryan Brito, they also revived the Bates College high school forensics tournament, Bajpai says, drawing 315 speech and debate competitors from 55 Maine high schools this year. "We hope to keep growing this tournament in order to develop a closer connection with the high school debate and speech community in Maine," Bajpai says.

Education back home in India is exam-oriented, and economics major Bajpai wrote his first-ever papers here. "Debate taught me to break up conversation into argument and analysis — that's the rubric for a paper. What used to take me seven hours now takes far fewer, thanks to debate."