Being a Guest at Wall Street Toastmasters

First I should explain the decision to join a Toastmasters club. I always believed that I am a good in giving interviews and presentation. I have aced 90% of my job interviews and have done quite well with my presentation to international audience, Asian (Taiwanese, Malaysians, and Singaporeans) to be specific. But I tanked in my Wharton. On introspection, I realized that all the interviews I aced were technical in nature and I knew the type of questions that are going to be asked. Even my presentations were technical in content. MBA interviews are different from job interviews. The questions do not have a right answer and many questions are unpredictable. In most of the MBA interviews, the interviewer would be from a different industry/background and the candidate should make sure that the answers are easily understood by someone from a different industry and keep the interview engaged. Ok, I need to develop my interviewing skills.

A major goal of MBA is networking. Good social skills are required to make the best use of MBA. Though I am not bad at social skills, I have scope for improvement.

I was looking for opportunities to enhance my interpersonal and communication skill. Earlier I had taken a course in “Business Communication”. The course helped me in a theoretical understanding of how to take interview, attend a group discussion, etc., but I did not have much opportunity to practice and take feedback. I thought Toastmasters could be a good forum to practice. So I decided to attend a Toastmasters meeting as a guest.

The club closet to my work was the “Wall Street Toastmaster”. The meetings are held on 2^nd and 4^th Thursdays between 12 – 1 pm. Yesterday (5/22) I attended a meeting as a guest pushing my usual lunch time by 1 hrs. From the name of the club and its location (one of Goldman Sachs building), I was expecting a lot of Wall Street Analysts and Associates in the meeting. When I entered the conference room, I was asked to choose any seat among 2 rows of chairs around an oval table and have a name card. The agenda and a review form/ ballot papers were placed at each seat.

The meeting started with the self intro of Guests. Surprise! There were 6 guests – 2 from of them were from advertisements and one recent MBA graduate. Since it was the term end for office holders, mementos were presented to them. The Toastmaster of the day – Meghan presided the day’s meeting. There were 2 prepared speeches. First one was by an Indian, who was giving his 8^th speech. He talked about travel locations in India and his speech is supposed to use visual aids. He had some cool pictures of places in India. The second speech was by a girl who was giving her ice-breaker speech. She talked about her own public speaking experience. She used lots of cue cards and the speech was like reading from the cue card. We were given few mins to write our comment about the speech and choose the best speaker.

Then comes the fun part called table topics. A question is posted and anyone can talk about it for 1 to 2 min. The questions were very creative and challenging. Vika had done a good job. Around 8 people made some funny impromptu speeches. Few questions I could remember are:

1. If you were a bird, where would you immigrate for Winter
2. If time and money was not a constraint, how would you travel from New York to California?
3. Give a tag line for promoting Fish as an alternative food
4. What crazy accessories would you fit to you bicycle?
5. If you are allowed to be part of a TV show for one month, what would it be?
6. If you have lots of time, what would you like to do?

We were asked to rate the best table topic speaker. Then the evaluators (Patrick and Eugene) for the prepared speech gave their comments – both positive and constructive – which helps in improving.

Ash was the Ah/um counter and gave the count for each of the speaker. And the time gave the timings of all the speeches. Meanwhile the feedback/ballots were collected and the winner of prepared speech and table topic speech got Toastmaster ribbons as awards. The feedbacks from each participant were given to the respective speakers. Ooh cool, so many feedback for improvements. Finally Joe provided a feedback on the whole proceedings of the Meeting. Wow! A perfect 1 hr meeting. I did not feel hungry.

I felt that I should join Toastmaster at the earliest and get benefited. I was expecting a lot of people with poor communication. On the contrary, most of them had very good communication skills. So lots to learn from them. The group was diverse, not just Quant guys or from any one particular ethnic group. Good. Overall a positive experience and long forward for the next meeting.