Thank You CAS

Before entering this class, when I heard the term “public speaking” it made me nervous. I knew that I was not the best at giving speeches and was not so comfortable about getting up and speaking in front of 25 strangers. After presenting my first two speeches, I felt a lot more confident about public speaking but I acknowledge that there are still some skills that I could improve. When I gave my first speech, I was not very nervous; however, when I actually got up to the podium my nerves really hit me hard. I noticed that I read off of my outline a lot, did not give a lot of eye contact, and was not very clear nor spoke at an appropriate pace. Although I believe that I practiced the speech to the best of my ability, I was not very satisfied with my performance on the first speech. During the second speech, I made sure that I practiced more and knew my speech better to avoid having to look down at my outline, so I can make more eye contact. I also spent more time researching my topic and on the outline which I believe helped me to do well. Although my second speech was far from perfect, I definitely improved on it. I still made some of the same mistakes that I did within my first speech; for example, not making full eye contact and sometimes speaking at a pace that was too quick. Besides the little errors, I was a lot more confident for my second speech as I began to know my classmates better which helped to ease a lot of my nerves. Overall, after presenting these first two speeches, I believe that I have gained very important public speaking skills and hopefully will be able to utilize these skills in my future experience whether its here at Penn State, at my future job, or within my community.