26th June - Toastmaster of the Evening

Heard of Toastmasters before? Well, then check out this website then: www.toastmasters.org. Sorry, have thinking quite a while about how to start of this blog entry... but then I thought the websites and the relating ones would give you guys an idea about what actually is Toastmasters..

I actually have been in Institute of Engineers Malaysia's Toastmasters Club (IEM TMC) for about four months (previously just a guest, following my father to a few sessions before joining as a member in March). Presented my first speech in March, and then another one I think in April... Well, I really think that this Toastmasters thing really helped me a lot in my public speaking skills (not that I want you to start wonder if I really am a better speaker, or communicator... or something like that... coz I have know I have a long way to go... I am still that kind of quiet guy... haih...), and I believe it will continue to help me in the future.

Anyway, for this post I am going to talk about my experience being the 'TME': Toastmaster of the Evening. The duty of this person is to coordinate the meeting, handle the meeting so that everything that is on the agenda goes on smoothly. I am in charge of scheduling, confirming speakers, mastering the ceremony a.k.a. MCing the meeting... and stuff like that la... According to my Toastmasters manual, usually the TME would be a quite senior member of Toastmasters... but somehow they all asked me to do... so I just accepted it lor... ahha..

Being the TME I really got to be professional and handle things that way: I got to send out emails to correspond with the members, who are mostly professionals such as professional engineers (since it's being held in the IEM Building in PJ...), but there are professionals from other fields as well, who are like two to three times my age... Got to cooperate with them in order for the meeting to be able to run smoothly.

Being the person who stands out there and conduct the meeting wasn't really hard actually, but you need to be a bit creative and able to adapt to the latest changes and going-ons in the meeting. A script was passed to me beforehand, so I just read through it. The result? Really boring... As though what I have been saying the whole night was like... a program or computer like that just executing the commands that have been entered into the program...

Really wanted to elaborate more on this... but can't because I have so many things that I want to blog about, and so many things that I need to do i.e. assignments (oh yeah, still getting used to the term, we now use 'assignments' instead of 'homework'... guess it's more like... higher class homework? haha...)

For more info on the club that I am attending to, you can check out this IEM Toastmasters Club website: iemtm.blogspot.com.

I'll blog more about this topic in the near future... IEMTM holds their meetings every second and fourth Thursday of the month, and unless unavoidable circumstances, I will usually attend the meetings (which means finished Programming lecture --> Straight to home --> Shower --> Dinner-->IEM Building in PJ until around 10 or 11pm...) Phew...