Matt Caspero, a freshman mechanical engineering major, gives a speech on global slavery during the TerpTalks event in the Hoff Theater on Thursday, April 9.
The code “A113” is present in every Pixar film. Everyone who watches the World Cup in 2022 could indirectly be supporting human trafficking. And only two of this university’s 103 early childhood education majors are men.
These are just a few points from speeches at this university’s first Terp Talks event.
The Terp Talks showcase took place Thursday night in Hoff Theatre, where six student speakers delivered speeches, which they had prepared and rehearsed for three months, to more than 100 members of the university community.
“We wanted it to resemble TED talks,” said Terp Talks President Cyrus Ameri, a senior biology major. “TED speakers go through nine months or more of preparation for their talks. We wanted to replicate that.”
Terps women’s basketball player and junior journalism major Chloe Pavlech welcomed the audience. After, Ameri took the stage to introduce his organization.
“Our mission is to enhance every student’s ability to communicate a compelling idea,” he said.
The student speakers then each presented a six- to seven-minute speech followed by a short Q-and-A with Ameri. Speech topics ranged from the company culture of Pixar Animation Studios to international and domestic human trafficking and were based on talks students previously gave in their required oral communication courses.
“The range of topics is just all over the place, and that’s a good thing,” said graduate student Yvonne Slosarski, who is studying rhetoric and political culture and helped coach the student speakers. “Here, they have to prove that what they are talking about matters to people who aren’t in their class, which was a challenge.”
The event ended with a speech from freshman government and politics major Jake Shapiro, who spoke about why students should take a gap year.
“It’s great that we can take this word ‘fearless’ and make it something real,” he said.
After being nominated by their former COMM 107: Oral Communication: Principles and Practices professors, students attended an information session and enrolled in COMM 388: Communication Practicum, an optional one-credit course made solely for students participating in the showcase. They also met with members of the communication department every two to three weeks to rehearse and develop their speeches with coaches like Slosarski from the Oral Communication Center, Ameri said.
Members of another course, COMM 498G: Seminar; Event Planning and Communication, were involved in putting together the event. Slosarski said the class’s focus is to plan and organize an event, and this semester, it was the Terp Talks showcase.
“It was really awesome to help find all the vendors and get the decorations, and you just get to see all of the different elements involved behind the scenes of planning an event,” said junior communication major Hailey Klebe.
Ameri founded Terp Talks and put together the showcase with the hope of giving students a platform to communicate their ideas. Going forward, he said he would like to see these showcases once a semester.
“The original idea was that on campus, all these students have, you know, great ideas, but there’s not one sort of organization that brings those ideas together and communicates them to campus as a whole,” Ameri said. “But we make it our goal to bring those ideas together and show students just some of the rich and diverse ideas students have.”
Slosarski said the event might motivate other students who might not know how to communicate effectively to participate in Terp Talks in the future.
“By seeing people who were in COMM107 who developed their idea to the point where the people in the audience care about it could motivate people to try to do as well,” she said.
