Back to the Future 17 Sep 2020 Online Chapter Meeting

There was a special segment hosted by Geri who invited her friend Nic Tan, a technical director to share with us Presentation Skills - Looking & Being Your Best on ZOOM. He shared useful principles of ZOOM such as avoiding windows with light from behind and low camera angle. He also showed pictures to illustrate the principles.

In the Prepared Speeches Segment, we had three speakers, including two Icebreaker speeches. First speaker Thomas Ng shared about his academic journey which led him to Chicago. After achieving straight As and a scholarship, he proceeded to New York for further studies and returned to Singapore in 1991. He misses his good ol’ days in NY and looks forward to visiting it one day.

Second speaker Yau Hong shared about his life as an engineer and how it’s hardship to be an engineer. Not many engineers actually stay on in the industry, in fact, only 15% of the 15% who make it stay on.  He also shared about a rare cancer that saw him go through 22 operations and 6 months of recuperation on a hospital bed.

Third speaker Cherylene, presenting a 20-minute Q&A session for her L4 Elective, gave us a crash course in Psychology 101, which is the scientific study of mind and behaviour. It is not about reading minds or counselling, as many mistakenly believe. Psychology can be branched into four main areas, namely biological psychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology and abnormal psychology. Cherylene briefly explained each area of study and fielded a 5-minute question-and-answer session expertly by tackling each question concisely and clearly.

Table Topics Master Rosalind led us in a thought-provoking session of Table Topics with the quotes and questions she had prepared. Here are some of them:

Malcolm: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.” (Helen Keller)

Yau Hong: “If you have the chance to go back to the future, what is one thing you will do?”

Sharon: “If you can fast forward to the future, which destination would you like to be in? Why?”

Rubin: “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction.” (Winston Churchill)

Bharat: “The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are

Marina: "Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future." (William Wordsworth)

Rachel: "The future rewards those who press on. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don't have time to complain." (Barack Obama)

We were honoured to have DTM Patrick Oei from Leng Kee Advanced Toastmasters Club to  conduct a General Evaluation for us. He shared feedback to help us improve on the quality of our online meetings.

He commended SAA Rubin for making the members and guests feel welcome. He advised the TME to start the meeting on time even if some appointment holders are late. We can get someone else to replace the timer temporarily if he/she is late to the meeting. Get members to provide their speech titles before the meeting so they can be printed on the program sheet. If the club President is presenting the Opening Address as a project speech, the TME should introduce it as such and there should be an oral evaluation for it. The presentation by Geri and Nik was timely and useful. However, the timing for Q&A was truncated and only one question was fielded. Starting the meeting on time would allow for sufficient time for each segment.

For Table Topics, choose topics that are short and sweet. Avoid overly long topics that are hard for the participants to digest. Patrick encouraged all members to visit other clubs to gain more exposure and pick up gold nuggets everywhere we go to accelerate our learning.

Voting results for the evening:  

Best Speaker  Cherylene Tan 

Best Evaluator Giridharan Somaskanda, PM3 (SAP TMC)

Best Table Topics Speaker Malcolm Chen 

Congrats to the award winners! 👏👏👏

See you at our next meeting on 15 October 2020!