Bina Nusantara University’s English Club (BNEC) successfully held its seventh English competition.

This year, the annual event was introduced as the first and biggest English competition in Southeast Asia. This 2011 Southeast Asian English Olympics (SEO) was held from Feb. 14 to 19. The competitive rounds took place at the Anggrek campus of Binus University in West Jakarta, while the final and closing ceremony on Feb. 19 was held at @America at the Pacific Place mall in South Jakarta.

The SEO had the theme “Ambassador of Nations”, as the competition aimed to broaden its scale to all Southeast asian countries. There were around 400 participants from various universities and high schools in Indonesia such as Makassar, Lampung, Palembang, Bali and Malang, as well as students from Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. They competed in six competitions: debate, speech, scrabble, story-telling, news casting and short movie making.

Participants not only managed to follow the competition’s schedule, they also learned from pre-competition active coaching more about specific skills and techniques from the official main judges. Participants had a chance to get to know Indonesia better in the Discover Indonesia Tour at Indonesia Miniature Park in East Jakarta. The SEO also required these ambassadors donate books in order to help Indonesia develop quality education and help children at an orphanage in Cibubur, East Jakarta.

The night before the semifinals, participants had a great time at a dinner. They tasted Indonesian food created by a noted local chef. Participants together with the SEO committee were pleased by the traditional music performance.

The earlier sixth National English Competition (NEO) from BNEC had a Guinness World Record for “The Most People Doing Crosswords Simultaneously”. On Feb. 21, 2010, 550 participants joined the competition. The certificate was handed over to Binus University and received by the convener, Enricko Lukman, and initiator Bryan Gunawan.

This year’s SEO at @America had a board of prominent judges. Dalton Tanaka was one of the judges in the news casting competition. This former CNN anchor, who now has his own talk show on a local television channel, even assured there would be a gift for the winner. “The winner will be my guest on my talkshow. And the theme is youth,” said Dalton.

There were other guests, including first Adjudicator in United Asia Debate Championship Jayson Gaspar Maulit, novel author Clara Ng, a former Cambridge debater Sam Block, TV anchor Timothy Marbun, national competitions chief adjudicator Bryan Gunawan, movie director Andi Bachtiar Yusuf and many more from Malaysia and Thailand.

The all-Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) debate team had its finals on Feb. 19, with team A the champions. In Scrabble, Christian OB (Binus University) was the champion and Robby Swandanu (Eso University, Lampung) was the runner-up.

Irene G. Demavivas (Alexius College Phillippines) was the champion for Speech, while Story Telling’s champion was Hilya Hamzah Raydina (SMAN 2 high school, Cimahi). Muhammad Ismal Bin Ishak (Universiti Teknologi Petronas, Malaysia) won the News Casting competition, and Short Movie Making field had IT Telkom Indonesia as its winner.