Discuss how you believe you have demonstrated strong presentation/communication skills. (MBA/Masters Essays).
December 11, 2008
“Between two equally well built products, the one with the better design/presentation will have a higher perceived value” - Raymond Loewy - Father of Modern Industrial Design.
As the student government President of Nigeria’s most prominent university, I had the opportunity to develop and regularly utilize my strong communication skills. It was not uncommon to be interviewed by the national press or invited to talk shows on national TV to articulate the opinion of students on government policies.
In the years prior to being elected, I had had first-hand experience of what skills were crucial to being viewed as a popular leader among students; at the time, it was considered good form for student-politicians to speak with cultivated bombast and speeches of my predecessors were packed with phrases like “circumventing perambulation” and “pyrotechnic demagoguery” and just about anything to keep the crowd roaring. To my chagrin, these speeches often led to outcomes that were more volatile than I thought necessary.
As a keen observer of these episodes, I learned a great deal about the art of public speaking and how one could use this skill to navigate the delicate balance between stirring a crowd while still holding the power to channel its actions. So as President, I adopted a measured style of speaking- calibrated in content and in tone, necessary to back up my claims as a president that sought to avoid the incendiary approaches of his predecessors.
I had started to hone these skills during my earlier involvements in debates as a high-school student and on a stint, shortly before college, as the presenter of a youth variety program on Radio Nigeria, a government-owned AM radio station. The most crucial step in the development of these skills, though, happened when as an undergraduate I became a member of an all-amateur campus drama club where I acted in about 10 plays in 4 years. It was here that I came to learn how to project my voice, enunciate my words, and repeat the same line in many different ways altering my inflection or timing or both, to elicit the desired audience response.
I have found all these experiences very helpful in my recent roles as a teacher and a researcher. As a graduate student, I taught over 10 sections of Chemistry and Physics Classes and gave two talks at international conferences and countless more at in-house group seminars. Earlier this year, I gave a talk at a Symposium on Chemical Kinetics and Dynamics in New York and followed that up three days later by giving the weekly Chemistry departmental seminar at the Institute of Technology where I am also teaching a class on Probability and Statistics this spring.
I have also demonstrated strong written skills in a variety of settings. Apart from writing two bachelor’s theses and a doctoral dissertation, my written work also includes a well-received inaugural speech and scores of press releases during my student government presidential tenure, guest columns which have appeared in student newspapers here in the US, and opinion pieces on a widely-read website catering to Nigerian readership abroad.
A further demonstration of my strong communication skills is my conversational fluency in four languages including Yoruba, English, French, which I started learning at the age of 5, and Japanese which, in spite of the demands of working on a PhD, I learned well enough to pass an examination certifying 300 hours of learning.
I look forward to drawing upon these experiences in the future as a financial engineer who excels in using language to communicate the most complex ideas to colleagues and clients in a very clear and lucid manner.
NB: This essay was published with the permission of the author, a friend of mine (He does not wish to be identified) . Posted under creative commons rule and use as a guide for your admission essays.
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