Although being the chair of department is a very busy job, Dr. Rosa has time to speak for many different people each year. He talks at professional presentations to electrical engineers all over the Unites States as part of the Student Professional Awareness Meetings that are held every year. He talks on ethics two to five times per year at colleges around the country. He’s been to BU, S. Dakota St., Air Force, a dozen or so schools in Texas, S. San Diego St., and as far as a small school in Haver, Montana. He’s been doing this ethics speech circuit for 20 years so far. The audience, mostly made up of students, is usually 60-80 people, but can be 200 at a successful event. These talks generally take an hour. I’m sure he could make them longer, as ethics in engineering can be very controversial topic (engineering is a science of cost/versus functionality, so what’s your duty as an engineer - to make something of quality, or to make something that costs less?), but he’s an energetic speaker and an hour is enough time for him to get his point across. As well as the ethics speeches, he gives talks to high school students at Cherry Creek called “So You Want to be an Engineer?” He gives them during the school’s College Days, where they bring in 250 colleges and about 20,000 students come through each year to meet different college representatives. He gives them the low down on what it means to be an engineer and how to prepare for a career in engineering. In addition he gives many other types of speeches, including talks on being prepared for a life of continuing change, talks at various conferences, and speeches at workshops he either hosts or attends. He also talks aperiodically to different professional groups. These talks can occur two to three times per year or not at all. It just depends on when the groups want him and if they call on him or not. To top all this off, he does our Circuits lecture 3 days a week for an hour each day. In past years he’s done it for 2 quarters, but this year he’s retiring after winter quarter, so he’ll only be doing it for one.
Skills that Dr. Rosa thinks are necessary to good speaking are confidence, ample practice, animation, and volume control. He says confidence will come as a result of fulfilling the ample practice requirement. He has a couple of methods for practicing in his inventory - having people listen and critique your speeches, taping yourself, and talking in front of the mirror. I feel having people listen to you is the best way to help your speech because only they know how they feel about your speech, you can’t just infer it from their expressions while you talk, unless you’re a really experienced public speaker. Audience feedback is the single most helpful thing in refining your speeches and speech-giving tendencies. For example, if you have a great speech and the audience is sincerely interested in your topic, you may still lose them if you have an annoying quirk that takes their attention off the speech and onto the thing you do with your eyebrows after every sentence. You may not know what you’re doing to lose them, but if someone tells, it’s easy to fix the problem. Audience critique is valuable in all parts of your speech from presentation to reasoning to organization, as we saw in the class critiques we did after the Dual Perspective I speeches. Taping yourself is a good tool to use as well. At first, for me, it really brought to light the way I talked. I didn’t know this, but I mumble a lot. It sounds clear when I hear myself while I talk, but apparently knowing what I’m going to say while I say it is a large advantage when figuring out what I’m actually saying. The tape also helped me picture myself from a third-person perspective, which can be difficult sometimes without a visual aid and using only mental imagery. As a visual learner, the videotape was helpful in recreating my every move and word, as well as my overall performance. A bonus is that playing the tape sped-up really helps me see my overall eye contact percentage. That made me put a greater importance on knowing my speech so I could look at the audience more than I looked at the outline. To see what the audience sees is to be able to critique yourself, which is just another tool you can use to improve your speaking. Even though I’ve never tried it, apparently talking in front of the mirror can be detrimental to your speech. Dr. Rosa said he does it in order to see what expressions he makes while talking. He’s a lively speaker, so I suppose this could help him get the right message across through body language. I really don’t see how it could be detrimental. You’ll definitely be more comfortable talking to yourself than talking to an audience, but if you seriously expect your image to appear when you give the actual presentation, there’s something wrong with you. Building up expectations of how a speech should or should not go is a bad idea, and any assumptions you make about what will happen on speech day will invariably be disproved, according to Sprague and Stuart. If you’re going to build up false confidence while talking to the mirror, it can be bad idea, but if you’re just doing it to improve your delivery, I think it’s ok. After using audience critique, video critique, and personal practicing methods, confidence in your speech should be established and you’ll be able to give the best speech you can.
Animation is getting up and walking around and being lively while you give a speech. Dr. Rosa is good at this. For example, sometimes he trudges like a dwarf back and forth while thinking out loud at the whiteboard. He doesn’t use a podium; he just walks around and does his speech. Even if he has an overhead or a Power Point presentation, he’ll remain mobile while talking. I’ve never seen him use either of these two tools in class, but my physics professor does Power Point for almost every class. His slides have many animations which only start if you click the mouse, but he’ll refrain from being glued to the computer while he’s talking, going back to click only when he needs to. This allows him to focus on what he’s saying, rather than what he thought should be said the night before. It also helps us students from being drawn in by the screen and then drifting of into half-consciousness, and instead makes us focus on a moving and talking person. While Dr. Rosa is walking around, he likes to see what his actions are because they can be corny or funny or inquisitive or even serious. It doesn’t really what they, the actions all help to keep the audience’s attention better than if he were sitting or standing in one place the whole time.
Volume control is a crucial part of Dr. Rosa’s presentations. To come off as a lively guy, you have to be a little crazy, and what better way to convey craziness than with shouting? Also, talking quietly and then exploding will get the audience’s attention effectively. If he notices that most of the class isn’t listening, he raises his voice to get the their attention again. A more subtle technique is to talk in a softer voice or put emphasis into points you want to stand out. There’s a device called a voltage divider, and when ever it’s needed to find the voltage of a circuit, he yells, “Voltage divider!” Whenever we have to use a current divider in a circuit, he quietly whispers, “Current divider,” in contrast to the voltage divider. This is just another technique of voice modulation. If you have confidence, ample practice, animation, and volume control, you’ll be on the road to talking just like Dr. Rosa.Skills that Dr. Rosa says he possesses are his excitement and his humor, while he says he could work on diction and, as always, practicing. His excitement is unparalleled because his is the only class I’ve ever had that my eyelids have never become heavy in. I’ve done the head-bobbing thing in every class except his since middle school. The sheer joy he finds in explaining electronic circuits to a bunch of sophomores is confounding. He even has a favorite voltage output waveform, and he says we’ll each have our own eventually too. None of my previous teachers has ever had such an interest in conveying the greatness of something that would normally cause you to say, “Ugh.” At first, his level of excitement can seem intimidating or can cause a loss of credibility on his part, so I’m sure he tones it down a little while speaking to groups that he doesn’t have prolonged contact with like us students. If you do know him for a while, though, you’ll find that he does, in fact, have large credibility with respect to engineering, but it’s only revealed after he knows he’s got your attention. While his humor is at times funny, it might only be funny if you’ve been an engineer for more than a decade. He’s a self-described “unabashed punster”, and puns make up the majority of his jokes. Here are some examples: A short circuit is when there is no voltage through that circuit. What do you get when you have two short circuits? A pair of shorts.A “Case C” circuit is a certain type of RCL circuit. It’s the kind of circuit that likes baseball. Get it?Despite the fact that he admits the puns get groans from the audience they’re something he considers a strong point. I still think they’re something he could work on for younger audience members or people who don’t know much about engineering. One thing he does continue to work on, though, is practicing enough, which can be a pain at times, but it’s necessary for making the most of your speaking opportunity. I’m sure some days before class he says, “Man, I know this stuff backwards, forwards, and upside-down – I don’t need to practice for this lecture,” but then he thinks about how he didn’t cover all the material he wanted to yesterday, so he’ll have practice for today to make up the ground. He says he could work on his diction and mispronouncing words, but I don’t really notice it. He grew up in New York and his first language wasn’t English, but I think he’s got the language down pretty well. The only thing I can remember that he does wrong is saying, “dis” instead of “this”.
During a speech, Dr. Rosa’s goals are almost completely audience-centered. He says a speech is not going to work if it’s self-centered. This is shown in his seemingly complete lack of self-consciousness while speaking. He’s always looking at the audience and trying to figure out what they’re thinking and how he can make the speech have a bigger impact on them. His bad jokes are further evidence of his audience-centered views. He’s willing to stand a little embarrassment and/or groaning to make sure that people are paying attention. He says that all self-centered goals are secondary to his goals for the audience, such as their retention of his ideas or their entertainment while they learn something.
Factors he takes into consideration for a speech vary from audience to audience. When he’s talking to deans and peers, he talks at a professional level, but it’s different when he’s talking to students. When talking to students, he tries to relate what he’s saying to their lives. He tries to make each audience member understand the importance of what he’s saying because if he doesn’t, they’ll think it’s not for them – they’ll think that he’s talking to someone else in the audience who can understand him – and the speech will fail. In order to relate the speech to your audience, it’s a good idea to keep up on significant current events of the area or of the group you’re speaking to, so you can tie it into the speech. If he’s in California, for example, or on the East Coast, he can use themes of the energy crisis or pollution, respectively. The general framework of each speech in a series will be the same, but each speech will be tailored to the individual audiences. This is a good idea because it while you’re tailoring your speech to an area, it will give you a chance to look at your speech and remember how it worked during the last presentation. You’ll have a chance to brainstorm new ideas and revisions while you’re thinking of a new theme to throw in for the new audience. The evolution of a speech throughout a speaking series is akin to a band having their songs evolve while on tour. For instance, the Dave Matthews Band used to write and play all their songs on tour before going into the studio to record them for a CD in order to gauge audience reactions to changes they made over the course of the tour, so that they could have the best possible song when they went in to record. They stopped doing that, and “Everyday” turned out sub-par. Taking a new audience’s reactions into consideration is a great way to evolve and make changes to your speeches, and thus improve them.
Dr. Rosa plans for each speech with a basic process. He thinks of an idea, outlines it, makes bullets, and then practices the speech over and over (or just one practice in the case of class lectures). He starts each speech from scratch (except when he’s doing the ethics speeches, which he just continuously evolves to fit the situation) to make sure that he’s creative during the speech writing process and to try out new ideas for the speech. Then he outlines it like we did for our speeches during the quarter. Then he makes bullets that will guide him through the speech while he’s giving it. He practices from both the outline and the bullet points so he’ll be able to remember main points, while recalling sub-points along with them while speaking. This will give him lots of freedom while talking to be animated, but will also provide a framework to return to if he ever gets too far off on a tangent or if he loses the audience with his actions and needs to provide some real content on his topic to get them back. This is a good plan, as it will allow him to be lively and credible whenever needs be.
This interview was very informative to me as a beginning public speaker. Now I will be able to get up in front of my fellow engineers or students and provide an informative, entertaining, and well-thought-out speech if I have to. The element that I lack the most in my speeches compared to Dr. Rosa is animation. I’ll have to work on that, but if I can put together slides or other visual aids for my future presentations, it’ll give me the chance to walk around and speak at the same time. Eventually I won’t have to hide behind the podium and fiddle with the sides of it; I’ll be able to walk around with confidence. It may seem like being unable to walk and chew gum, but maintaining a relationship with the audience while walking around them and talking about a given subject is a challenge for me. We’re going to have to do a senior engineering thesis in a couple years, so if I remember what Dr. Rosa told me about confidence, practice, animation, and volume, and also everything I learned in ORCO this quarter, I should be fine.
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