As an alum of Gap Year University and a current humble first-year at Brown, I have experienced two wildly different years since I graduated from high school. Last year was full of real world experiences like job applications, fifty-hour workweeks, Craigslist roommate searches, grocery runs and rental contracts. In all my rambling and playing adult, I felt that high school and the parallel quest to get in to a good university had prepared me pretty well for assuming the mantle of responsibility. The fact is that Brown students generally know how to succeed in the real world before they start living in it. Still, as I learned in my year off, there is one skill that I wish I had learned to cultivate: public speaking. Brown should require that we learn that holy art.
My gap year job as a lab henchman taught me the importance of presentation. An essential part of my lab work was quarterly lab demonstrations, in which I was required to present my findings to groups of people who intimidated and awed me every four weeks. I had never learned how to do that. The countless hours I spent designing, gathering and sifting through data were demeaned and made less comprehensible by my inability to present in an eloquent and entertaining manner. At my midterm presentation, the data that I expected to be well-received and potentially published was instead met with glossed-over eyes, yawns and slouches. My confidence hemorrhaged.
I began to think about which scientists, corporations, artists and politicians had the biggest impact on the world. The real game-changers are the ones who have an idea and get it out there. President Obama is not the most intelligent man in the world, but he knows how to speak, and now he is the one with the most power to do good. Apple does not provide the most capabilities or the best value, but the company knows how to present products. Not surprisingly, it is now the world’s most valuable corporation. The reason Darwin is arguably the most important scientist of all time is because he wrote “On The Origin of Species.” The church wouldn’t allow him to speak, so he used written words and cemented his legacy for all time.
Every career path requires communication skills. Lab researchers must make the case for why their work is important at conferences. Writers must participate in book tours and television appearances. Teachers make their careers out of communicating. Businessmen must sell products, investments or ideas to people with money. Communication is everything. Woody Allen famously said, “80 percent of success is showing up,” but if you cannot communicate and make the case that what you have is important, then you might as well stay home.
Brown already recognizes that for its graduates to be competitive, they must be able to communicate through writing — that is why we must take WRIT-designated courses. But public presentation does not end there. Brown should make us learn to speak. Spoken communication classes should be at least as prevalent as classes that are WRIT-designated, because in the real world spoken communication is used exponentially more than written communication. To do that, our school must offer more public speaking classes and designate them as Spoken Communication (SC).
Brown should then require all students to complete two SC classes before senior year. The only speaking course I have found is TAPS 0220: “Persuasive Communication,” which is tiny and restricted to seniors.
In general, each class should include more speaking assignments. Any class that has any sort of research component — almost every class — should have an easy time introducing a presentation assignment. Larger classes could use sections as presentation times or they could follow a method similar to the required presentations in ENGN 0090: “Management of Industrial and Nonprofit Organizations,” in which students schedule presentation times with their teaching assistants. Smaller classes could use their class periods. In this manner, it would be very simple for Brown to enrich the education of its students with a speaking component all while keeping the Open Curriculum intact. No one would have to make too much of an effort to take a speaking class.
After my terrible showing in my gap year lab presentations, I resolved to work much harder on how I spoke and presented. A few weeks later, I had improved enough to have several people congratulating me after my talks. By the end of my work, I presented a strong enough case that my boss even wrote an article on the data to send to the Nature Methods Journal, though it may never be published. What changed over my time at the lab? It wasn’t that the data got any more convincing — it was that I became more convincing in my presentation. Success lies in presentation. Speaking is the most important method of presentation. Therefore, speaking is crucial to success.
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