The 2016 Asian English Olympics “Radiate Your Light”

Asian English Olympics (AEO) has come to its fifth year after it was first held in 2012 hosted by BNEC. For the past previous years, AEO has been successfully improving participants’ English skills, given meaningful experiences to be remembered in their youth, and broadened the networking of participants across Asia.

The 2016 AEO was held on 16th – 20th of February, 2016. With the theme “Radiate Your Light”; the purpose is to give a platform for the participants to unite together and express their potential and passion as Asian Youth. Whoever they are, wherever they come from, it is no longer a barrier for them to show that they have great desire and potential inside themselves. We hope by joining this event, participants are able to get new insight and inspiration to improve themselves. Not only the participants will get the platform to learn, the committee, liaison officer as well will learn a lot in this event.

This year Olympics was completely fun and exciting to challenge participants in Debate, News casting, Scrabble, Short Story Writing, Speech, Spelling Bee, and Story Telling. As an Olympics, there is an ‘Institutional Champion’ title for high school. Every delegate who wins in each field of AEO will get accumulated point for their institution to be crowned as ‘Institutional Champion’. This year, we got 571 participants (148 international participants and 423 national participants) coming from 10 countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippine, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, South Korea, Bangladesh, and India).

The 2016 Asian English Olympics has make everybody who involve in have a special memory, like what Mr. Dalton Tanonaka (news casting judges) stated that “Another good year of good organization, good planning, and good execution. Students of BINUS, all those who create and support this program always do a good job.”

With Mr. Dalton Tanonaka (the right side) and Mr. Rex Remitio (the middle one)

This statement also supported by Mr. Rex Remitio who stated that “I think it’s one of the best college held events in Asia, its well organized. The hospitality is world class, the staff is really specific on the needs and attending to the needs of its participants. And there’s a divergent of different culture which is well appreciated. Perhaps in following years you can invite more countries, so this event will be melting part of different Asia’s culture. But finally it’s really world class.”

 With Mr. Rex Remitio (middle)

The satisfaction of this event not only comes from the judges side, but also from the champion of speech competition, Mirosha Somasundram (Sunway University, Malaysia). She said

“I think it is the fact that you guys invited so many different countries and your hospitality is great, nobody get this hospitality in any other competition. We don’t feel like contestant, we feel like royalties. The people, including the committees and contestants. And the kind of topics you guys give us, like each round right? It’s so challenging and different. It tests each and every aspects of the speakers. SO, I really like the part, so it’s really puts you into a completely test. The pressure is like everyday is one round after another, it’s really test your methods of ability. I think it’s a good thing because of the end we can see that we’ve improved a lot as speakers. “

Champion of Speech Competition : Mirosha Somasundram (Sunway University, Malaysia)

By being a committee in this event, it taught us a lot of how to be a professional, work under pressure, time management, responsibility, solid, and so many else that all of the thing that have been mentioned above will give the improvement as what of one our committee (Ian Niko, Director of Support Department) said “At the beginning, I had to think critically because I knew that I needed to know more what needs to be done. If I am committed as a committee for AEO and I didn’t know what was going to happen. I had to make sure that I must not make the same mistakes like last year and that needed a little bit of research to help me. And then I would have to know different personalities of different people that I was working with so that I could work well with them and then I have learnt to make a bond between people inside my department.”

Beside committee, there was also LO who helped to run this event. By being a liaison officer, they feel like they got something to be learned. They stated that “By being the part of this event, they can explore their experience as well as expanding the networking. They can make a new relation with the participants from another country, city as well as with the committee who has different major.”

Some committee and Liaison Officer

Overall, The 2016 Asian English Olympics has given the best memory for each of the one who involved and joined it. It will give the improvement, memory, learning platform for each individuals. This event is not only conducted to give the atmosphere of the competition, but it also created as a learning platform for the participants to grow up and improve their skill, expand the knowledge by having a coaching clinic from the judges.