Mattie Smyth

Part V: Communication Studies Speech Reflections

 

Believe it or not, the speech that challenged me the most was the very first one, the 'This I Believe' speech. For some reason I just couldn’t figure out a topic. We had ample time and instruction to figure it out, but I struggled with coming up with something that I felt would be worthy of my first speech to these new people I would be living with for a year. This was almost like a first impression speech. Did I want to show my humor side and make it really funny? Did I want to talk about something really serious and gain some respect from my peers? I struggled with which side of myself I wanted to portray.

 

You’d think it wouldn’t be very hard to come up with something you believe in. However, considering I had just moved out from under the wings of home, I was just barely starting to form ideas, opinions, and beliefs completely for myself for the first time. After many phone calls to my mom, a bunch of google searches, and procrastination until the night before it was to be presented, I finally came up with something I believed in. The first line of the speech was, “I believe that you can tell a lot about a person by how they treat the pizza delivery man.”I put a somewhat humorous twist on a larger topic in which I went on to unfold that you can tell a lot about a person’s character by how they treat the simple, honest, minimum wage workers in their lives. I think this was a good topic for my first impression because it gave my peers insight into my values, my background, and my subtle humor.

 

I grew from the experience in that I figured out what was expected of me in the class. I wasn’t quite sure of the expectations beforehand. I also learned that college is a time for yourself to really form your own beliefs and figure out who you are and who you want to be. This speech allowed me to reflect upon that.

 

Another speech that was incredibly challenging for me was the group speech. It wasn’t a challenge because half of my grade was dependent on others, no. I trusted my group that they wouldn’t let me down. It was a challenge just to find time to get together and hammer it out. Unbeknownst to me, trying to get four busy college students together at the same time for a couple of hours a day while we are all going different directions even though we all live just down the hall from each other was extremely frustrating. Thank goodness we had a topic that I was already very knowledgable on, business interviews.

 

We all ended up sacrificing time that we had allotted for other things, but that’s something I learned from. Our group worked together well and even if someone couldn’t make it to a meeting, we had a Google Doc set up so that they could still do their part. Looking back on the experience, it was a pretty positive one. We got a good grade, gave a great speech, had fun with it, and had everyone pull their own weight. I realized that it is possible to have group projects run smoothly and effectively. Prior to this, most of my group experiences consisted of one person doing all of the work and everyone else getting the same credit for it. I am excited for group things in the future now that I have a better idea of how to make it run soothly.

 

Because this speech was only challenging in the aspect that it was hard to make time for it, I learned to kind of get my priorities straight when it comes to school work. Usually I wait until the last possible minute to do my assignments, although with this I felt like I would be letting the group down if I did that. I realized that if you start working on it a week or two in advance, you will feel so much more prepared and confident when it comes time to present. We’ll see if this actually carries over to my future assignments and papers though, haha.

#procrastination