Your first speech in the class asks you to create and deliver a professional self-introduction speech. You will have 3 minutes (with a 15-second grace period) to introduce yourself to your audience. This is a professional introduction where you situate yourself in the context of the career you are working towards. Personal details may come up, but the main focus should be the professional element. In preparing your speech, make sure to reference chapters 9 and 11 for how to create an excellent introduction and conclusion.

Although the specifics and content may differ, your speech should specifically do the following three things: 1) introduce yourself, including basic details about course of study, name, and other relevant traits or interests; 2) clearly express your career aspirations in detail (i.e. not just Im interested in finance); and 3) summarize a new development or trend within your intended field. When creating and practicing your speech, keep in mind our discussion of cross-cultural communication and remember that while all of your audience members are fellow Zicklin students, only a few of them will be in your specific field. Your audience should be able to understand the development or trend as you present it, even if they are not experts in your specific career field.

Do not memorize your speech or write it word for word. As with all our speeches, you will deliver this speech extemporaneously from limited notes. You will want to be ready to share a practiced speech that is based on limited notes. Examples are available.

Purpose:

The assignment is designed to help you hone a common professional genre while practicing adapting to an audience and showing your knowledge of a field. The introduction is common in professional speech communication, from the ubiquitous elevator pitch to initial team meetings and job interviews where you will always be asked to tell us a little bit about yourself. This speech practices the skills crucial to success in those (and other) settings. It also helps you start translating specialized knowledge to a more general audience and using concrete examples to show your knowledge of your chosen field.

The task links to the following course-level learning objectives:

Produce examples of spoken and visual communication that are engaging, clear, professional, evidence-driven, ethical and persuasive.

Adapt to diverse audiences.

Evaluation:

This speech will be evaluated using the accompanying rubric. As the rubric shows, the speech is assessed primarily on content but also factors in delivery. Speeches will tend to succeed based on careful preparation and practice. Successful speeches will explain the new development/trend such that a broad audience can understand, express clear and concrete career aspirations, and show practice and care.

Speeches that are excessively under or over the 3-minute time limit will struggle, as will speeches that do not summarize or discuss a trend/development or do so in such complex or technical terms that a diverse or broad audience could not understand.