HELP University Toastmasters Club: November 2015

Today is a joint meeting with Taylor’s College Sri Hartamas and HELP University Toastmasters Club. We started off with an interesting introduction topic: Why are we optimistic in the things that we do. Reasons ranged from purpose, basic needs that we are privilege to have, arriving at the Toastmasters meeting on time, morning rituals and finding parking. Next, it was a joint presidential speech from Joanne, TCSH’s President, and Tory Yew, HUTMC’s VPE.

Table Topics - with a really unconventional way

Tze Wei from TCSH introduced a really, really unconventional Table Topics Session by introducing the wheel of fortune to pick the participants. Once they are randomly assigned, a short mv will be shown, and then the title of the Toastmasters Speech will be based on the song of the mv.

Janet Wong came up and joke about how she’s “all about the money”, but then she shared her ambition of becoming an educator, and life doesn’t have to center on money. Then, Steven came up and share us a story of him participating an event and forged strong relationships, and how he has to “let it go” despite how much he really wanted to stay longer in the event. After that, it was Rina who was given the topic “I am sexy and I know it”, who has a story of a boy who came to her and said “Excuse me you dropped something – my jaw.” She replied “You dropped something - my standard.”

Taufiq shared his own story, how his year begun with a huge success of becoming a district finalist in International Speech Contest and then how he lost a lot of money through starting a business, but he will “not stop believing” that he will be able to repeat his success. Bryan then came up to share about how he tries to “have a good time” with everything that he does by incorporating fun into everything in life, include those which others deem as mundane. Lastly, Cheong Min came up and shared about the “best day of her life”, as she stepped out of her comfort zone and joined cheerleading as it was something that she has always wanted to do. Table Topics Evaluator James Kan came up and gave a detailed and elaborated evaluation on all the table topic speakers after the speech.

Steven from TCSH TM

Janet Wong from TCSH TM

After the short break where we enjoyed the sandwich from Ahmad, the prepared speech session started off Cheong Min giving her CC1 speech “choices”. She started off as a village girl and then moved to the Kuala Lumpur. She couldn’t handle the change and felt really stressful about the changes. As a young and innocent girl her uncle asked her to drink more water as a cure. With the placebo effect, everything improved and her life changed. She ended her speech with a wonderful take home message: Life is a choice, and every choice takes us on a different journey.

Vincent begun the CC7 speech “dream” by sharing all the successes which begin with people who set a goal and a dream for ourselves. If we chose to let our family to be a shield from us, stating that we are not pursuing our dream because we want to go further in life, then what will you say, when your child came up to you and shared a dream of his? He then shared the story of Sylvester Stallone, about how he faced numerous failure and rejection before attaining success in his movie “Rocky”.

Vincent giving his CC7 speech

The third speaker, Soo Yee Theng gave a speech CC9 “Grateful” on how she begun really well initially as a SPM scorer. After she moved to her University, she started to get bombarded with many assignments and tests, and she started to feel home sick. However, she started to communicate with her family again, and she felt like the simplest messages to her family actually created so much connection within and she encourages us to do the same as well.

The fourth speaker, Ivanna gave her ACB2 speech “Stairs to Heaven”. Ivanna begun by sharing about how she wanted to write about the evolutionary theory, but her bible stated otherwise and she chose not to. She then proceeded to breaking down bible, and shared the story of how the world was created from the almighty bible. The really wonderful thing about her speech was her expressive way of telling the story with humor and sarcasm, which captivated the audience’s attention.

Ivanna doing her ACB2 Speech

In the evaluation session, Edward gave a short summary of Cheong Min speech and stated how she could improve the speech by lengthening the speech. Next, it was Shelby evaluating Vincent’s speech, where she gave a short and sweet evaluation which was based on the speech objectives. In between, Shelby shared a point of improvement, on how we shouldn’t overshadow the audience with our performance, but always to focus on the value in our speech. Taufiq then evaluated Yee Theng, on how she can use emotion to catalyze the persuasion. Lastly, Vincent Hoy shared a really strong evaluation with a well-versed language, and gave 3 challenges to her – know our audience, rehearse her punch line, and remain composure.

Shelby giving her evaluation for Vincent's Speech

Vincent Hoy giving his comprehensive evaluation

After the evaluations, it was the technical evaluation by Ah Counter Thivytria, Grammarian Thivina, and Timer Dheeno. General evaluator, Siok Looi from Speak Comm Toastmasters Club shared about how we really need to focus on time management – one thing that all young people get carried away. The best Table Topics Speaker was Taufiq Tajuddin, best prepared speech was Vincent Sar, and best evaluator was Vincent Hoy.