My Second Speech at Macintalkers

2011-10-06T19:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I delivered my second Toastmasters speech at Macintalkers. The feedback I get during these meetings makes all the effort put into them worth it. I guess you can call me a feedback whore.
After you deliver a speech, you receive feedback from club members rating areas such as preparation and eye contact as well as recommendations for improvement. It can be a bit overwhelming receiving the feedback of sometimes over twenty highly type A personalities at once on these little forms of paper, they pretty much tell you in a very candid form what they REALLY think about the whole thing.
Yesterday's speech used an econometric paper on a human capital model that determines optimal rates of schooling based on certain constraints - it tests and gives weight to factors believed to influence a person's optimal level of education. So I built the PowerPoint presentation, explaining the model in the most simple terms possible, which is very important when presenting something technical to a non-technical audience and then I made some charts and graphs to as what one club member/evaluator in the audience wrote: "This speech had a lot of potential to shed light on the reasons for contemporary trends in school attendance, but it amounted to little more than a recitation of the claims and figures of the paper in question. Give us the Cliff's notes on the topic. Why are more people going to school? What correlations were expected, and which were surprising? Consider the audience, pare down your slides and make it interesting. You started to get there when expressing the concern that we were automating ourselves out of a job." Well... that was a lot to take in, but very constructive because no one has ever asserted that I'm boring YAY! It always seems that I'm the object of contention, but for once in my life I get to be boring. Is boring synonymous with commonplace and/or acceptable? If so, then he's telling me that my speech sucks and that I need to work a little harder, which is probably true ... Pending as of now: next speech topic ... explaining to technocrats and engineers how they're actually coding themselves out of a job from an economic perspective because I'm sure that's going to sit well... Maybe they'll find it humorous? I guess it's all about finding your audience and your voice, but will it ever be good enough? ...Most likely not because people WILL always want more.

If unable to view presentation below - please follow this link: SPEECH POWERPOINT!!!

Erik's Blog

My Second Speech at Macintalkers