The American Museum of Natural History Event

A few people who were in the symposium at the Peabody museum were invited to present and attend a workshop at the American Museum of Natural History. When we first go to the event we were a tad bit early so we got a mini tour of the museum. After that everyone who was attending was brought to an auditorium. So we started the workshop hearing from some guest speakers. The guest speakers had various jobs in the STEM(science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field. Ranging from someone being a doctor to a woman who rode around in a bus going to different schools teaching kids about science! The guest speakers told us about the importance of networking and how it affected them. We got to hear all of their success stories, which were amazing to me. Hearing them talk about the ups and downs and the ins and outs of what they went through to get to where they are today was inspiring. We also got to ask them questions and they all gave great advice. One thing that all of the guest speakers said and agreed on was that we should make long and short term goals for ourselves and strive to reach them. They also said it’s okay if our goals change over time because we may have to jump around a little bit before we find our true passion.

After the guest speakers we we’re introduced to an awesome improv group that was going to teach us about public speaking. At first I thought that was a weird mix and I didn’t see how it would work out but it ended up working perfectly. The improv group broke everyone up into groups, including the parents and chaperones. Then we all went to different rooms in the museum. After everyone got settled in the new room we all played a little warm up game called zip, zap, zop. Then we all did a series of exercises that had us thinking on our feet. My favorite one was when we all were sitting in a group and our instructor would pick one of us and we had 10 seconds to run to the front of the group and wait for the instructor to give us a crazy scenario. After we got our scenario we had to talk about  for 1 minute it as if it really happened and we were telling the story. The scenario I got was I was on a plane once and Mel Gibson sat down next to me and tried to sell me tuple wear.

The members of the improv group was superb at making the learning experience unique and fun. Even though it didn’t sound like we were doing a lot of learning about public speakers after each exercise our instructor told us the purpose of why we did it and after we each spoke we we’re given advice on what we can do better and we we’re also shown how we looked. So what I need to work on is to not hide my hands behind my back while I talk and instead I should be using them and speaking with my hands. I also have a terrible habit of rocking back and forth as I speak and that can be distracting to the listener.

After that we had lunch and then we everyone presented their poster boards. All of our boards were hung up for us and we all took our posts by our work. Then everyone who attended the workshop including the improv group and the guest speakers walked around and viewed the poster boards. Some people asked questions, some people just looked and there were a few people who were giving really good feedback to the posters and that was the end of the workshop.