Alumnus Reid Furubayashi ’11 Coaches Speech and Debate Internationally Under Fulbright Scholarship

Somewhere between participating in Speech and Debate at SAAS and leading Mock Trial at Claremont McKenna College — Seattle Academy alumnus Reid Furubayashi ’11 wound up accepting a Fulbright Scholarship to run a Speech and Debate program in Bulgaria for two years post-graduation; an experience that ultimately rerouted his trajectory from law school to executive recruiting. Looking back at his path and the choices he made, Reid says, “I would caution students: don’t worry too much about where x, y, or z takes you in your trajectory, rather, enjoy each experience because you are gaining great skills.” 

Reid is a SAAS alumnus of the class of 2011. While attending SAAS, he was a soccer guy, a track student; he was in all of these physically competitive environments. He was also a member of student government, Mock Trial, and had done a little bit of acting. 

Reid recalls taking Speech and Debate his senior year. “I was just switching it up,” says Reid, “and I remember graduating my senior year and kicking myself that I didn’t start Speech and Debate sooner.” 

SAAS had a fantastic Speech and Debate program at the time, led by Joel Underwood who was a legend at SAAS. “It is it’s own world,” says Reid. At Speech and Debate tournaments you see the same people, and it is highly competitive; like sports, but there is a strong sense of camaraderie among student competitors. 

“I didn’t think about Speech and Debate as ‘performing’ in the same way as sports,” says Reid. “Even big theater productions didn’t feel that way. There was something very intimate about performing for a small audience in Speech and Debate. And that level of intimacy with performances was super helpful. Those tournaments were a nice balance to round out the versatility of performance I encountered while at SAAS. Short answer, because of SAAS’s emphasis on the Culture of Performance, there was no way it did not help me immensely in my journey after SAAS.” 

Reid went on to compete in Mock Trial while attending Claremont McKenna College. He became Vice President of the club his junior year, and then President of what was, at the time, the largest student-led program in California. Most Mock Trial programs have dedicated faculty and staff brought in — but Claremont is student led. “It was that same level of camaraderie that existed at SAAS,” says Reid, “and I loved it.” 

At the end of his junior year, Reid applied for a Fulbright Scholarship, which is a U.S. cultural exchange program that grants scholarships to graduating students and young professionals interested in improving intercultural relations and competency through study, research and teaching. 

“I was fortunate enough to be accepted, and was deciding between Fulbright and other job opportunities that were more straightforward.” Reid recalls his decision was rooted in timing and opportunity. “Part of my selling point was another Fulbrighter who started a Speech and Debate program that was very new and very small. This was right on the heels of my experience in Mock Trial and the timing felt very kismet. I saw, in my application going into the Fulbright program, that this Speech and Debate program was just beginning and I saw it as an opportunity.” 

The Speech and Debate program is called Bulgarian English Speech and Debate Tournaments (BEST) Foundation and it is run out of a small town called Montana. Montana is one of the most under-resourced cities in Bulgaria and in the European Union as a whole. The BEST Foundation is intended as a means for teaching English to Bulgarian high school students. There is travel involved, too, and the students who participate in the program travel on buses to visit and compete in different towns in Bulgaria. Travel is not commonplace in this town, or for these students. The program, in this way, provides a lot of “firsts.”

During Reid’s first year in the Fulbright Program he taught English to the Bulgarian students participating in BEST. The program started with only 6 students and grew to about 37 students by the end of Reid’s first year. A lot of the students participating in tournaments did not know English, so they were learning English through the means of Speech and Debate. And many were terrified to do public speaking. “It was lovely to watch students blossom like I saw back when I was a student at SAAS; and it was lovely to be on the other side of it, as their coach,” says Reid. 

“My experience in Speech and Debate at SAAS was ultimately why I extended my Fulbright Scholarship,” recalls Reid, who spent a total of two years with Fulbright. “I scaled back my teaching hours and Fulbright allowed me to stay another year to help build out the BEST Foundation.” During his second Fulbright year, Reid moved to the capital city in order to run the BEST Foundation as their Assistant Director.

“Fulbright was an incredibly pivotal experience for me and what I thought my career would look like,” Reid says. “Before, I was really into roles that were a bit more quantitative: I was looking at law, business, and things that were more finance oriented. After teaching for a year in Bulgaria, and then leading the BEST Foundation for a year, I returned to the states with my sights on a people-focused career. That is what Fulbright did for me, it changed my tone on business school and law school, and it rerouted my trajectory.” 

Reid got connected to executive recruiting with Spencer Stuart, a firm that assists tech, education, nonprofit, energy, and industrial companies with head hunting for their C-Suite: CEOs, CFOs and other executive leadership. And after five years, Reid landed a position as Executive Recruiter for Google. 

Looking back and looking forward, any given student won’t know where they will end up once they graduate. SAAS’s Culture of Performance took Reid to Bulgaria. Then into executive recruiting. And according to Reid, the skills you gain — more so than the resume you are crafting — will get you to where you want to go. 

“I would say get your feet wet in all the things you are interested in. I took philosophy and economics — classes tailor made for law school applications. That is where I thought I wanted to go. Then senior year of college I took an internship with a law firm and I hated it. It was not for me. But having that experience was formative. Be intentional about the things you are interested in; give it a shot in some context outside of the classroom. Those experiences are ultimately the most helpful.”