Right or wrong, sure or unsure, Anika Jain (12) projects confidence when she debates.

“My strategy is that instead of just standing there and being unconfident, it’s better to be confident and wrong,” she said. “When someone in cross examination asks me a question that I don’t really know the answer to, I either own up to it and say ‘I don’t know’ because it’s probably irrelevant, or I just make something up, because it’s better to be confident in something that’s wrong than to not be confident or not say anything at all.”

After years of experience, Anika has learned how to overcome her pre-debate nervousness. Before she begins, she takes a deep breath and runs through the different points she needs to cover in her speech.

“I think that [nervousness] depends on the tournament, and that also goes away as you continue debating,” Anika said. “At some of the bigger and more difficult tournaments, there is always a feeling of stress. Although there tend to be less teams, like 50, there [are] always 45 really good ones. I feel that it’s a more efficient use of your time if you channel that worry and nervousness into preparing to adequately be a part of engaging debates.”

Besides debate, Anika also bakes once or twice a week. She has gotten to the point where she does not rely on recipes, but instead experiments with different ingredients.  

“I tried to make an almond butter loaf [recently]; that did not work out,” she said. “[Baking] seems so trivial in that it’s not something I’d put on my college apps, but it’s exciting in that it teaches me how to do other things. And so, I’m not always looking up a recipe or following the exact measurements.”

Looking back, Anika believes that baking carved a clear path towards her interest in debate.

“I think baking has given me the tools to get into debate,” she said. “In debate, you have the files and you have the evidence, but you still have to explain that evidence. I think all the different forms of evidence might be the ingredients, and the way you present those and argue those is the type of improvisation I learned from baking.”

Anika sees the parallels between baking and her own life.

“I like to experiment when I bake,” she said. “I throw things together and see how it turns out. And I think that’s like my life. You have ingredients like grades and school and others like free time and family, and you kind of just have to keep experimenting with those until you have the perfect balance.”