by Fakhitah Yusuf
edited by Syafiqah Suhaimi
Have you ever heard of the IIUM International Arabic Debate Open? IIUM hosts an annual open debate tournament in Arabic and any type of educational establishment worldwide are welcomed to send participants to this event. This year, IIADO was hosted at KICT for the duration of four days. There were 13 institutes that competed. The representatives were from two secondary schools, two universities from Indonesia, one university from Brunei, and the rest were all local universities. That is the general idea of IIADO 2023.
I was given the opportunity to be a part of the working committee for that event. Working in a small team, I was on the committee for the Bureau of Publication and Promotion (PubPro) for IIADO 2023. Hence, this is the story of my experience being a pubpro for that event. We were a small team, consisting of Nazeem as the Head of PubPro with his assistant, Fatimah, along with Adibah, Dayana, Irdina, Soleha, and me as the subcommittees.
What is the workload for PubPro at IIADO? We were supposed to be responsible for preparing the media materials for the event. However, this work had been covered by the head and his assistant of PubPro. So, we proceeded with capturing pictures and hosting the lives during the debate session.
Every committee is assigned a certain duty, and mine was to create a montage of the event. Therefore, I was the camera operator during the event to collect the materials for the montage video by recording videos and taking pictures. It was such an exciting experience, where I could learn how to operate a DSLR camera, which I had wanted to do for such a long time. My friend laughed at me because of how blatantly excited I was. I was ecstatic to see that the pictures and videos I had captured turned out well as I scrolled through the gallery. Compiling and editing the montage video was a difficult task and I even had to sacrifice my sleep just to make it for the closing ceremony.
As mentioned before, we hosted the live session for the debate competition. It was not my task, but I did it once because we were lacking in manpower. The debate session was particularly intense. The debaters spoke in Arabic as if it was their first language. I could not even understand what they were arguing about. Hosting a live session on YouTube for the debate session was not easy work. It was not the same as doing it on other social media platforms, such as Instagram or TikTok. We needed to install an app, and the process was quite complicated. Though, we successfully held the live session.
There was still a lot of PubPro job description than I had include here, but all in all,
I have been a PubPro committee member for many events, but this one was one of the best experiences I have ever had while being in the PubPro team. It was tiring because it was a four-day event, but I managed to learn so many new things, and I hope I will get to learn more by joining it next year. It has been such an amazing experience being a part of the committee for IIADO 2023.
Our small team, Bureau of Publication and Promotion
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