Yostivanich

Are you seri­ous??? Is pretty much what went through my head all yes­ter­day lis­ten­ing to a round of speeches by stu­dents on their future career. Some quick back­ground infor­ma­tion, cur­rently I am tak­ing a pub­lic speak­ing class, and the class admit­tedly is pretty bor­ing for me as I did debate in high school. The class is a basic intro­duc­tion to pub­lic speak­ing, how to speak and gain­ing some quick and dirty prac­tice speak­ing in front of an audi­ence. So no one here is expected to be an expert pub­lic speaker or even in all hon­esty a decent pub­lic speaker. How­ever this last round of speeches made me ques­tion some stu­dents’ choice in their career field and their log­i­cal capabilities.

The first set of speeches were okay, mainly because the stu­dents were allowed to use mul­ti­ple note cards for the speech. Although granted the major­ity just read from the note cards for most of the time, the speeches were acu­tally pretty decent for a first time speech. The next round of speeches have just gone down­hill. The stu­dents are only allowed one note card for a 4–5 minute speech and the prob­lems just increased like crazy.

We have speeches that run on and on, for over 6 min­utes in one case. Which you lose points for going over the time limit. Also we have speeches that have logic that is sim­ply inde­scrib­able. For instance one stu­dent men­tioned that to do well in this field you had to be out­go­ing and a desire to meet peo­ple and “that unless you’ve lived in a cave for the last 10 years you can do that.” Ummm in case you haven’t heard there are a whole group of peo­ple called intro­verts that are the exact oppo­site of out­go­ing and they really are not a small por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion or live in caves. In fact we even talked about these sort of peo­ple in our class and dis­cussed some of the research into intro­verted and extro­verted per­son­al­i­ties so you have no excuse for not know­ing these peo­ple exist.  Or the per­son who dis­cussed a field that has exactly 3 schools that spe­cial­ize in it and isn’t grow­ing at all because the field by it’s very nature is basi­cally stag­nant. If this per­son had done any sort of research they would have real­ized this and not said that it was grow­ing because well there was no rea­son given, but it was grow­ing. The one that per­son­ally took the cake was the stu­dent who used their mother as a cred­i­ble expert. Really your mom is a cred­i­ble expert, what are her cre­den­tials, oh she doesn’t have any, thanks but no thanks.

My over­all favorite though was the sev­eral mar­ket­ing majors who described con­fi­dence as an impor­tant aspect to their job and yet were obvi­ously uncon­fi­dent in giv­ing their respec­tive pre­sen­ta­tions. They destroyed their entire cred­itabil­ity in one sen­tence with­out a sin­gle per­son hav­ing to think at all. It was hor­ri­fy­ing on some lev­els. The sad thing is that it wasn’t just one per­son who did it, mul­ti­ple mar­ket­ing peo­ple got up in front of the class looked scared and ner­vous like you wouldn’t believe and then said that to do mar­ket­ing you had to be confident.

I’m writ­ing this hop­ing that at some point I will under­stand what dri­ves peo­ple to miss these glar­ing prob­lems in their speeches as well as try and come to term with how some peo­ple truly decide on their field of study in college.