Professional Development is an important aspect of the AAAS Fellowship
program. We are scientists who are trying to expand our skill sets and
improve ourselves! Therefore, one of the things I *really* wanted to work
on as a Fellow is my communication skills. For this reason, I have joined the NSF Chapter of "ToastMasters International" -- a group which meets every week to work on our public speaking. Every week, there are opportunities to give a prepared speech, or to stand up and give a 1-2 minute off-the-cuff speech on various topics to work on speaking on the fly. I've done a number of those short speeches, but last week I gave my very first prepared speech, my "Ice Breaker".
When you join Toastmasters, you get a booklet with a number of different types of speeches that you can work through. The first one is just to get used to speaking in front of an audience, so you talk about the subject you know the most about -- yourself. It can be on pretty much anything related to you, and is supposed to last 4-6 minutes (keeping your speech within the allotted time is one of the goals). I took one of the suggested prompts, "how did you get to your current position", and wrote a practice script to help me prepare. While I did NOT memorize this speech verbatim, I had the outline of it in front of me, and had memorized some of the lines so that I could fall back on those words if I started blanking. I was pretty happy with my talk at the end of it, and I received some very nice comments from my speech evaluate (as well as advice -- I apparently overuse the word "so" when I speak, for example). This is not the exact speech I gave, but I thought I would share it with all of you, and give you an idea of how I got to where I am now!
