Confronting Stage Fear – Toastmasters @ IIIT-H

Fighting Stage Fright Head On !

IIIT-H Toastmasters Club, after a 55-day hiatus, conducted its first meeting of the semester, a Freshers’ special, wherein attendees from UG-1 were introduced to the idea of Toastmasters.

An amazing line-up of speakers and a fun and enlightening table-topics session had the people engaged. All the attendees enjoyed despite the erratic pace of the events.The meeting was attended by around 30-40 people, 9 of them being Toastmasters both in-house and external and the rest being UG1, with the exception of a PG1 student.

The event started with a brief history of Toastmasters International, and we had the host explain the structure of a Toastmasters meeting, with its 3 sections – Prepared Speeches Section, Table Topics Section, and Evaluation Section. Then we had the role-players explain their roles.

After that, we had a prepared speech given by TM Prathima, who attempted her 8th Project for her “Advanced Communicator – Gold” certification. Her speech, called “The fringe benefits of parenting” was based on her experiences living with and raising her 15-year-old daughter. She had the audience in splits and cracking up with her humorously presented observations about her 15-year-old daughter and the lessons she learned from that. (https://conversionwise.com) Following that, as promised, we had one of the current coordinators of the Frivolous Humorous Club, Tanmay Pathak from UG-2, give a small keynote speech about how he builds up any set for his open-mic. This was basically a sneak-peek into the trade secrets of a stand-up comedian.

A brief moment of pep talks later, we had TM Prathima take the stage and inform and educate the audience for about 5 minutes on the Table Topics Section, followed by TM Divesh donning the hat of Table Topics Master. This time, the Table Topics Session was unique since we had TM Prathima helping out each of the speakers in building a Table Topics Speech in the middle of their speech. In all, we had 4 Table Topics Speakers – Guests Vishal, Tanvi, Pranjal and TM Krishnakanth – attempt to speak on the proverbs given respectively to them.

Next up, we had the Evaluation Section, presided over by TM Manideep, who presented his report after his team – TM Divesh, TM Bhavyajeet, and TM Lalitha – presented their reports.

Since we had only one prepared speaker and very few roleplayers, we took a vote only for the Best Table-Topics Speaker for the meeting.

Best Table-Topics Speaker – Guest Tanvi.

The meeting ended on a high note and we had generally positive feedback from everyone about the meeting.”