Senior Trevor Anderson won first place in Hillsdale College’s annual Edward Everett Oratory Contest. This year’s prompt was “Social networks: Recreating the oundaries between public and private spheres.”
Anderson said he almost did not enter the contest this year because of his class workload, and at one point, he almost gave up writing. He kept it up when his girlfriend Kirsten Block, also a senior, encouraged him to keep going.
When the speech was finished, he was visiting grad schools in the two days before the tournament.
“I was memorizing in spare time on train rides and waiting for interviews … on the plane, on the car ride back,” Anderson said.
He arrived back in Michigan with four hours of sleep and competed against 30 other students in the preliminary round.
In the semifinal round, Anderson recalls, he forgot his introductory paragraph and thought, “There is no way I am getting into finals.”
Despite his speech being a minute under time, he went on to win the $3,000 prize for first place.
“It was totally worth it,” he said. “$3,000 is a lot of money.”
Anderson says that with the money, he plans to “pay off debt to my parents, buy a pair of sandals, and put the rest in savings. Because summer is coming, and I need sandals.”
