November 30, 2023 (newsweek.com) – Emmanuel Makinde is a second-year undergraduate at New York University on a pre-medical track studying neuroscience. Drawing from his early debater career in the Washington Urban Debate League, Emmanuel is an active policy debater at NYU, where he has qualified for the National Debate Tournament. Aside from debating, Emmanuel currently works in a research lab at NYU’s Center for Neural Science, where he studies memory formation in the brain.
Because I approached high school with a mindset conformed to the directives of my authority figures, I pursued debate. I presumed the game would give me a look into a realm of standard, colorless academia and fulfill wishes that were not mine. The activity, however, strangely afforded me a colorful variation—one where I found excitement in the configuration of my diction and the thought that preceded it.