EXCEL REPORT 2: UTM ACES TOASMATSERS WORKSHOP: HOW TO CRAFT A SPEECH WORKSHOP

The UTM ACES Toastmasters how to craft a speech workshop is a workshop that organized by the UTM ACES Toastmasters Club. This workshop is held on 2 November 2022 in Dewan Kuliah 1, C17 at Faculty of Science. The purpose of joining this workshop is to understand the basics of public speaking and improve my confidence in public speaking .

The graduate attributes that I had achieved in this activity are communication skills, thinking skills and leadership and teamworking skills. In this event, I learnt the importance of communication skills where we need to ensure the information is clearly send to the receiver, and this is known as effective communication. Besides that, I also learnt the thinking skills where we need to think first before we speak. Besides that, we must not just speaking, we must also know our audience and interact with them. This helps to attract the audience and making them become interesting to what you are speaking. Last but not least, I also learnt the leadership and teamworking skills as the event have group us into group. We need to work together to complete the task provided by the speaker.

The workshop begins with ice - breaking activities in which each participant must find another participant based on the colour match listed by the moderator. Following that, the participants must exchange information such as their names, hobbies, and dreams. The ice - breaking event allows the participants to get to know each other better. After that, the speaker demonstrated some useful skills and techniques for speaking confidently. Each group must discuss the topic and speak in front of the group. The event concludes with a photography session.

The impact of this activity on the development of graduate attributes is that students are able to develop and strengthen their communication skills, thinking skills, leadership and teamwork skills. This is because, during the workshop, I must communicate with my group members in order to complete the task. I must also ensure that my ideas are successfully communicated to my members, which is one of the effective communication skills I have learned from this workshop. Aside from that, the event helped to improve my critical thinking skills. This is because I have learned that in order to generate more creative ideas, we need to think from a variety of perspectives. For example, the speaker said, "Why not cats?" to counter his opponent's desire to pet a dog. The speaker does not state the disadvantages of dogs directly to the audience, but rather allows them to choose between cat and dog and made them compared the two animals. This demonstration taught me a lot.

Furthermore, participating in this activity helped me gain confidence in public speaking. I have made a lot of friends from various cultures and backgrounds. We assist one another in overcoming the fears from the stages. It has been a pleasure to meet new people during this workshop.

The difficulty I encountered was being nervous when speaking in front of others. However, I will keep practicing in order to overcome my weaknesses and will be able to do so in the future.