Everyone has different fears as we go through different life experiences. However, the one skill used by everyone that we almost all fear is public speaking.Â
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Given that I’m a junior now and will be doing interviews throughout the year for potential internships, I knew I wanted to work on sounding smarter, especially as I tend to talk quicker and say “like” when I’m nervous. As soon as I saw this public speaking class in the course catalog, I signed up.
The class consists of different assignments such as impromptu speeches, an informative speech, and a TED talk. For these talks, the professor, who is amazingly radiant and has endless energy, would record us. We also had classmates observe one another on aspects such as tone, inflection, and body language. Once we read our peer evaluations and watched the videos of our performed speeches, we are required to fill out a self evaluation after.
Even though I have only been in the class for less than two months, I can already tell the amount of growth I have made in public speaking and communicating with others. To give an example, for the first impromptu speech, I thought my biggest problem would be saying “like” frequently and talking quickly. However, the most common comment among my classmates was that I said “um” too much. I decided to count how many times I said it when watching the video, and I said it 22 times in less than three minutes. That is approximately one “um” per every eight seconds.
The fact that I wouldn’t have even known about my “um” problem if it weren’t for this class is scary. For my next impromptu speech, I made sure I took a deep breath before starting to talk, talked slower, and replaced “um” with a pause. I ended up saying it only twice.Â
There will always be room for one to get better at public speaking and public speaking is always used for presentations in class and the workforce whether you are interviewing or presenting an idea to a handful of executives.
This class will change your life. If you want to start to tackle any of your fears head-on, this class is a great way to do so. The professor is incredible, and I’ve become friends with everyone in the class as we help one another to improve our speaking skills. Class registration for the spring isn’t too far away (it also fills an Arts & Humanities requirement), so make the right choice in picking classes.