First of all, I'll admit that the food was much better at CEC this past March than it was at WECC. It was far more classy and (unlike WECC) I didn't find broken glass in any of my meals. As for the hotel, the nice thing about WECC's is that you can rent out an entire small hotel to engineering students for the four days and not have to worry about other guests getting upset. Of course, some people found the police cars being parked outside on a regular basis a bit off-putting, but us "Big City Folk" are used to that by now. The low prize money, about half of the value of the Ontario winners from my understanding, can be attributed to the $10,000 price tag that came with Spirit Of The West who was booked for the conference at Friday night's Foreplay event. Having won our event at WECC, I can say that I'd have taken the extra few hundred dollars instead of seeing SOTW for the fourth time, but of course hindsight is 20/20.

The competition itself was reasonably well organized and Science World worked well for the debaters at the event, with two venues (Lab A and the HotSeat) available for our battles of wits. The HotSeat venue was my personal favorite, not so much because I'm an attention-seeker, but more for the fact that debate is a pretty good spectator event. As a spectator, the HotSeat setup (a small bowl with stadium-like seating) was much more appealing, and allowed the audience to get much closer to the competitors and therefore be much more involved.

I can't speak for the other competitors who probably had difficulties with hundreds of screaming children around who didn't seem that interested in their entrepreneurial efforts, but from a debaters point of view, the competition was handled pretty well. The judges and chairpersons seemed to understand the rules enough to make logical rulings on points of procedure and the spectators seemed to enjoy the light-hearted resolutions presented.

Of course, SFU had an excellent showing at WECC with the following results:

3rd in Corporate Design
1st and 2nd in Entrepreneurial Design
2nd in Explanatory Communications
1st and 3rd in Extemporaneous Debate
3rd in Team Design

Hopefully, our success this year will encourage other engineering students to compete in future WECC's and deliver even better results. Perhaps, some engineering students will take it upon themselves to host a WECC of their own... after all, it's one of the only things left that we haven't proven ourselves better at than UBC.