Personal Experience Speech, first draft

[tsukikage]

Alright, I finished writing my Personal Experience Speech and went through it once to verify that it fits within the required timeframe. Didn't really edit it, as I'm quite tired and I'll probably be editing it while practicing tomorrow. However, if you're bored and have any constructive criticism, feel free to share.

Assignment description: Please be prepared to deliver your Personal Experience Speech during our June 18th [by which she means 16th] class meeting. This speech should cover your name, hometown information, major, what you want to do when you graduate, why you are taking this class/what you hope to get out of this class, and any other appropriate information about yourself that you would like to share. The objective of this speech is to feel more comfortable speaking in front of the class, and for me to see how comfortable you are with speaking in public. This speech must be between 3-5 minutes in length.

My name is Nastassja Riemermann, and I was named after a dead cat.

なんてね。 [Yeah, yeah, I know I should cut that part out. ^_^; But even if I didn't, people would probably just think they didn't catch what I said.]

Actually, my parents named their cat after the German actress Nastassja Kinski, and after the cat died and I was conceived, they still liked the name, so they decided to give it to me as well, but it still amuses me to pretend I was named after the cat.

I grew up in Minnesota, with my mom living in St. Paul, and my dad living ten minutes away in Minneapolis. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between April 1, 2000 and July 1, 2006, the Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington metropolitan statistical area had the 16th largest population in the United States, with approximately 3.3 million residents. I lived there for the first 24 years of my life, and moved to Champaign in May of 2009 to pursue a job opportunity.

I attended the University of Minnesota on-and-off for many years, experimenting with different majors: Asian Languages and Literatures with a focus on Japanese, linguistics, computer science… However, none of these ended up working out for me. Right now I am pursuing a path in accounting, since I tend to do well with straightforward number-crunching. To that end, I am working on an A.S. in Business Administration. If things go as planned and I don’t end up changing my major yet again, I will complete a B.S. in accounting either at UIUC, an online university, or a university back in the Twin Cities (as Minneapolis/St. Paul is known in Minnesota).

Since high school however, my true passion has been Japanese language and culture, so whatever I do after I graduate, I really hope it will either be in or involve Japan. At the same time, I am a dual U.S.-German citizen with immediate family living in Germany, and my German skills are quite poor, so I feel a strong obligation, both to myself and to my family, to move to Germany for some period of time and gain at least a modicum of fluency. Living in either of these countries, especially Japan, will probably require spending at least some time teaching English as a Second Language. I was in the Teaching English as a Foreign Language minor at the University of Minnesota and spent some time volunteering as an ESL teacher. Although I’m taking this class to fulfill a degree requirement, I hope I’ll find ways to apply what I learn in this class to giving lectures and other tasks in the classroom. I also hope that this particular course’s focus on cultural intelligence will aid me in navigating through Japanese and German culture effectively and diplomatically.

As a final note, you may notice that my speech is a little strange, as if I have an accent. Since I will be speaking in front of all of you rather frequently, I should explain that this is actually related to a birth defect called a cleft lip and palate that caused my mouth to not fully develop before I was born. For the most part it has been repaired and I have gone through years of speech therapy, but I remain somewhat nasal and I don’t form all of my consonants correctly. It is my further hope that this course will help me enunciate more and make myself easier understood, and I appreciate your understanding. I look forward to working with and learning from all of you this semester. Thank you.

Tacked-on last paragraph is tacked-on. Although a part of me really wants to address my speech impediment, and early on at that... But maybe I should do it in the discussion board post about how I'm feeling about taking the class and whether I'm nervous about public speaking, or maybe there's no real reason to address it at all. If I were giving a formal speech at a graduation or whatever, I certainly wouldn't feel the need to include a disclaimer like that. At the same time, I don't really have any better ideas for a conclusion to the speech, and although that one's quite weak, I do feel like it's something, and I'm not exactly in the mood right now to think up something better.

Not related to this speech specifically, but to the class, I'd really like to pick up a personal tape recorder or something like that, so I can listen to my practice speeches. It'd probably be a good investment anyway. 'course, first I have to pick one out. Walgreens has a $80 mp3 player on clearance for $40 which includes a microphone and voice recording capability, so maybe I'll pick that up and see if it does the trick? (Gotta love Walgreens' generous return policy.)

Random Sai icon 'cuz I just watched that episode yesterday (?), and yeah, hilarious scene. どうしましょう！どうしましょう！

Comments

[akaneko.livejournal.com]

I'd definitely keep a section on your experiences with a cleft palate in the speech, whatever editing might be done to it. It's a good idea to move it to an earlier portion of the speech - since it's congenital, it would naturally belong early on in an autobiographical talk.