Seniors seniors Emily Volk and Maggie McGehee placed second and third respectively in the UIL District student congress competition to advance to the state finals in Austin. This is the first year Argyle has participated in this event, yet they have high hopes of placing well in state.

Student congress is similar to debate, where students discuss world issues as if they were governmental officials.

“Student Congress is an event where you are given a bunch of congressional legislative topics in advance to study and develop a position on,” McGehee said. “Then in the meet they will pick a series of topics from your list and you have to go up for three minutes and assert your position. After that, you open up for questions.”

Mr. Hertel is the advisor in charge of helping the competitors in their preparation. All three were thrown into unknown waters this year but have so far come out successful.

“He’s really new to this too, we all are,” Volk said. “We didn’t have any idea what we were getting into when we started this. Once we got it figured it out he gave us free reign to prepare and come to him if we had any questions.”

For the competition, the students had to be knowledgeable in multiple governmental and public issues fields.

“We did twelve topics overall,” McGehee said. “Among them were bills regarding the common wealth of Puerto Rico and more popular ones like gay marriage, organ trafficking and other interesting topics.”

Both seniors are leaders in the schools’ debate program, so the transition to student congress was fairly smooth.

“The skills that you learn in debate are what make or break the speeches that you give,” McGehee said. “The topics are submitted by schools and they often choose topics that correlate to the topics they’re currently debating, so it’s important to know what is currently going on.”

Though they already had the skills, the competitors had to prepare very quickly for the event, and are glad they’ll be able to put more work in before state.

“We found out about this two to three weeks before hand, so I put some hours into it, mostly a lot stress,” Volk said. “For state, we have work days planned and a lot more time where we’ll be seriously hitting it because we’re going up against people who have been there before.”